The year that was...

As 2013 draws to a close I'd like to reflect on my favorite Furman Elite memories.  I do have a small handicap having only joined the group this September but a lot can happen in 4 months! So here are a couple of my top moments of 2013 with Furman Elite...

1. Visiting Furman in July and telling Coach Gary I wanted to join the group.  His reply, "why don't you think about it some more and tell me by mid-August." I hope he never gets into sales.

2. Receiving an email from my soon to be roommate, this kid Michael Hammond, saying that he will be bringing a puppy to live with us. The pup, Brail, has turned out to be part black lab and part cat-dog as he climbs around the apartment with little grace.

3. Putting my altitude tent together with my girlfriend Bridget, our first true test of compatibility.  The tent still stands.

4. Ripping the football across the pool with the next great American steeplechaser, Wilkerson Given.

5. My first workout on the Furman golf course were I was dropped like a bad-habit.  A summer of life guarding and eating pork roll sandwiches didn't help my fitness level.

6. The "lunch at Ale-House" that turned into lunch, and dinner, and Sunday night football.

7. When it was time to strip down to singlet and shorts for our first race as a group and mother nature decided to give us a shower to add to our cold early morning plight.  Thanks for the good times Richmond.

8. Arriving at our month long rental house in Flagstaff, Arizona and running around the place calling rooms like the first episode of "The Real World." Especially when we found the missing room outside the main house which Jack and I claimed and coined "The Bro Den."

9. Beating Jeff See twice in a row in Ping-Pong.

10.  The arrival of Furman Elite's father, Coach Robert Gary, in Flagstaff.  It was no surprise that with his arrival we all had our best workout of the trip, capping a great month of growth as athletes and as friends.

Happy New Year, 2014 looks bright for Furman Elite

-Craig

A Very Furman Elite Christmas

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the nation
Furman Elite trained hard, through cold weather frustration.

Craig went northeast to the so-called Garden State.
I'm not sure if Bridget joined, probably left her in the crate.

Nicole traveled north to her home state of Michigan.
That cat seriously better not scratch my chest again.

It was off to the See's for Furman Elite's favorite pair.
I'd love to see the Christmas sweaters Heidi makes Jeff wear.

For Jack, family was near, in the town of Chapel Hill.
A good thing, as he's likely tying his shoes still.

Stephanie roamed the land, traveling who knows where.
T. Paste has no boundaries, no bad days and little hair.

Surely Wilkerson rests at a ranch in the south
Shooting skeet, eating duck, hardly moving his mouth.

Back in Ohio, Cory plays his PS4.
I wonder if he can do grass field loops any more.

Lee and I argue, sometimes intensely debate.
He's probably happy back in 'Bama where I can't make him irate.

The Chad likely slumbers, fatigued from our nonsense.
Actually, probably not, as I keep having to move those hurdles myself; it's quite intense.

RG and the gang are back in Chicago, the place of his birth.
Hopefully enough eggnog and he'll forget about 15 by K on the first.

That last one was a questionable rhyme, but it's okay.
I'd just be happy to celebrate New Years the right way.

As for your humble author, Brail and I are just great.
He has a certain surgery upon our return so we're hastily searching for a mate.

So to my family, friends, and those many I've yet to meet:
Happy Holidays and New Year from Furman Elite!

-Michael

A Flagstaff Tell-All

Well guys, we made it! Furman Elite Flagstaff survived 29 days at altitude and lived to tell the tale. You know how they say "What happens in ___ stays in ___"? Well, what fun would that be? Furman Elite isn't shy about sharing our secrets! So, without further ado, a round-up of the best-- and worst-- moments in Flagstaff, Arizona.

2 10 day cycles. There were good days. There were bad days. But one thing was certain: lots and lots of running.

Countless hours crafting. I can safely say Baglady crocheted a dozen or more presents.

1 glorious week with The Chad

1 visit from #robertgary

500+ hours watching football. The boys said we'd only watch football on football days... but the only days the television was free of a football game was Tuesday (it seemed).

1 road trip to the Grand Canyon. Glorious! No one fell.

3 trips down to Sedona. 

108-- the number of miles Nicole and I ran during our first 10 day cycle.

4 pool sessions at the NAU pool. Let's just say we're glad that is behind us.

~25 days where snow covered the ground. Bonus points for days we didn't see the sun.

2 thumbs marred by a slight slip of a knife.

2 Direct TV boxes

1 circuit blown

4 trips to JoAnns / Michaels

1 furnace man called (what was his name again?)

Half a dozen Percy circuits

2,000 calls to the house owner

1 (max) day in between trips to the grocery

4+ massages from Bo Reid, master masseuse!

0 people voted off the island

1 arguably okay / questionable 1k workout

1 AWESOME 1k workout

3 minimum number of layers worn at a time on a run

3 kitties missed

1 million hours of bonding time

6 bottles of iron consumed

1 hip-hop album (dropping soon)

30 maximum number of eggs Stephanie had in the fridge at one point

8 flower crowns made by Mama Kitty

0 number of words Craig could say without abbreviating it

1 blog post written late (sorry guys!)

0 puzzles completed

While it's so nice to be back home, it's safe to say we cannot wait to go back!

Happy Holidays!

xoxo,

t-paste

You Don't Know... Bolas

Real Runners' World--Kachina Village (map it)

A final altitude blog post coming to you straight from Forest Highlands, the once pristine neighborhood that Furman Elite has taken over for the last three weeks and made our own. One week to go and we have yet to exploit the 36 holes of golf, two immense club houses, pools, tennis courts, and other amenities reserved for that run-of-the-mill family with a bit too much money, a few too many mountain homes, and a genuine fear of the simplicity of a tent and an overused JanSport backpack. But don’t get me wrong, thanks to The Hi-Lands, Furman Elite has been blessed with a near ideal setup on the outskirts of Flagstaff. I’m sure the timing helps, arriving right between seasons when the weather is too cold to adventure into the mountains, but the snow accumulation is not quite significant enough for skiing (but just enough to complicate our daily running routine). I’m not sure how Jeff pulled off the deal he did to get us this place, who he wined and dined, who he was forced to sell his body (or Heidi’s) to, but we certainly couldn’t have asked for a better location or housing option for the six members of Furman Elite who bravely took a leap of faith and tripped it to altitude. As such, I can’t speak for the suckers who remained in Greenville during this time, enjoying the mild South Carolina winter, the home-made cafeteria meals, and the company of Bobby Gary; I can only assume, in spite of progressing nicely with their training, that without the rest of us present to entertain them and pump up their egos, they have resorted to cannibalism, or crocheting at the very least. Speaking of Coach Gary, he will be joining us at altitude in just two more days!! It would be a lie to say Furman Elite has been lost without him, but we do need a fourth guy to make ping pong doubles a reality, so welcome Coach to our stomping grounds. There’s a pullout in the BroDen or an extra bunk bed in the room at the top of the stairs (watch out, it’s covered in tomato paste).

So for our readers curious about the logistics of our Olympic-preparation training center in Flagstaff, allow me to indulge you. We’re crashing in a quaint 22-bedroom (give or take) cottage at 7000ft about 10 minutes from downtown and NAU’s campus. Through a series of connections, we’ve managed to obtain use of most of NAU’s essential facilities on select mornings when the rest of the world is soundly sleeping. In the case of the two or three snow storms that have struck the area, we pile into our all-wheel-drive GMC Monstrosity and off-road it down to Sedona, which, at 4000ft, has remained clear for our running pleasure. Otherwise, Flagstaff is home to miles and miles of dirt roads, the ones that wind deep into the Coconino National Forest and leave you considering where you might stash that next dead body. The training effect is slow to set in; the first couple weeks at altitude leave you gasping for air as if you’d been gut-punched by the same guy that killed Houdini. I think everyone felt pretty out-of-shape to start things off but the adjustment to the thin air is now becoming evident. Today, for instance, we tripped it south through Oak Creek Canyon to our go-to running location near Sedona. Over the course of our progression run, I, for one, felt akin to Justin Gatlin, Tyson Gay, Juice Jacobs, Eddy Hellebuyck, Mary Decker, Lance Armstrong, Leonid Shvetsov, Rashid Ramzi, probably Taoufik Makhloufi, and Christian Hesch, among others... all athletes who have taken advantage of the extensive aerobic benefits that altitude training has to offer, of course. Except for Hesch, he plain doped. Point being is, despite struggling to hit times at altitude that we’re usually accustomed to running, it is great to find affirmation in the few runs we do where the oxygen is plentiful. I know we’re all hopeful to see big gains in our aerobic fitness with four weeks of training in Flagstaff. We’ve sacrificed our sanity, certainly any shallow friendships we may have built prior to coming here, and the busy social lives that Greenville cultivated. But with those sacrifices comes the opportunity to say with full confidence: “Arizona, huh? Yeah, I was there once. That’s the state next to the one where they did ‘Breaking Bad’ right?”

-jackie b.

Dear Mr. Henshaw,

Here we embark, on this, our third week at the Flagstaff compound. Our second week without The Chad. In the last 15 days we’ve made at least 10 trips to Safeways, 3-6 trips to Michael’s and/or Jo-Ann Fabrics, and went to no less than 7 stores looking for a turkey baster and meat thermometer on the Thanksgiving day.

We’ve watched too many hours of football. Had not enough hours of crafting. My hair is slowly dreading itself. And much like Mama Kitty, I miss my precious cat fat Nurmi.

And together have run miles on miles on miles of beautiful Flagstaff runs.

But anyway, here’s some gifs with mediocre captions!

a tasty of some beautiful flagstaff tree ice

my favorite, the furman elite pre-run stand

some pre-run lady skips in the tire tracks

exciting crafting blanket gif

 craigers & femezy pong skillz

sitting down to watch football! and/or gopro videos

how we do the cleaning

 post endless-thousands buffalo time

aannndd finally, an out of context shout-out to the Furman teams

on their double SoCon wins

Until next time, 

The Bag Lady / @nicolebbush

Rally Point

             “To live is to fly, all low and high/ So shake the dust off of your wings and the tears out of your eyes”
                                                                                                                   --Townes Van Zandt

 As Furman Elite set out for an early morning threshold session, the first of the year, Jeff looked up into the clear October sky and declared it a great day to be alive. Two months ago, I woke up to one that surely wasn’t.  

            Right before noon on August 24^th, I was in Athens, GA crawling from an air mattress on the floor of a duplex, reeling from a late night and ears ringing from a Drive-By Truckers concert.  After the show, the Gilmer boys got word that our beloved 14 year old golden retriever was in end -stage renal failure—I pressed my father to euthanize her as soon as possible and resolved to stay in Greenville, having long accepted the realities of her advanced age. John, my identical twin, had taken it a bit harder, shedding a few tears outside of the Georgia Theatre. We were going to lose our childhood friend, but it was ok.  It was ok until John received a call that would change our lives.

As I filled my Gatorade bottle with water, I didn’t hear his phone ring—I only saw him bouncing on his toes, carving a path into the carpet, eyes narrowed, as if focusing on something far off but rapidly approaching, mouth downturned, strained. I could almost taste the metallic pang of fear in mine. Within seconds the urgency of his voice matched the lines in his face, “Wait, calm down. Wait, what?” Grasping like a drowning man at the side of a lifeboat, I pleaded with my brother,“Who is that? What’s happening? John, what’s happening?” Unmindful, his eyes widened.

 “Patrick, are you sure? Ok. Ok.” He stopped, pivoted toward me, and shared the vision, now clear and monstrous: “Clint shot himself.”

One of our oldest and closest friends, a former high school cross country teammate, had committed suicide earlier that morning. It’s still difficult to even write the line, let alone countenance life without someone with whom I had expected to share a great deal of it, but in that moment, I saw the grim realization in my twin’s face, a twisted mirror of the trauma that would soon be my own. I paced in a tight circle, taking the phone from my brother to hear for myself from our inconsolable “triplet,” Patrick, also a former teammate. I aged years in the hours that followed, as we notified our friends and family. I didn’t weep until I finished one last call, to the home phone number that I had memorized long before cell phones did it for you.

As I write this, I still have Clint’s number in my phone, as if I can somehow recall him to life if I preserve the mundane traces of his existence. It’s hard to read our text conversations. That’s where he doesn’t feel so distant. Maybe he can get off work to go fishing this weekend. Maybe we’ll just have to get lunch. The vague, lingering sense of unreality lives in an iPhone.

I got a call the next day and knew in my heart what it was about: I had already begun writing the eulogy. His father’s voice cracked when he asked me—only if I were comfortable—to say a few words, the words that a parent never could. He wept before I could finish telling him that I would love to talk about his boy. I packed a black suit, a week’s worth of clothes, and my running shoes and headed south on 85.  I bought a Beach House album and played it on repeat until I cleared Atlanta. I didn’t stop driving until I hit empty. I forced myself fix a dinner plate after I pulled into our driveway in Mobile. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal in almost 24 hours.

          
          My twin and I, always better together, found the right words to honor our friend and finalized the eulogy as we cared for our dying dog. Our old 5A state championship team gathered at our high school track and swapped stories late into the night. The next day, I pretended that facing a packed chapel was no different than toeing a starting line and finding courage in the face of doubt, strength amid pain. The unspoken lessons of an unforgiving sport that often demands more than you believe possible to offer kept my voice steady and clear. They helped me to hold a sobbing mother and to tell a 12 year old how proud he made his big brother. And like one 400m repeat past the breaking point, we woke up the next morning and put Honey to sleep. I carried her cradled and wrapped in a blanket into the vet's office and closed her eyes when she was gone.

         But those days were only the beginning of my battle with grief, a near-constant retreat. As an athlete, it affected my body in ways that I couldn’t have imagined: I lost sleep, my joints hurt, my head throbbed. They were the phantom pains of mental distress, as real as any physical ailment, but impossible to pin down. Easy runs became a chore and resisting the urge to crawl back in bed a daily struggle. I surveyed my previous season, one of both incredible progress and incredible disappointment, and wondered why I was even trying to rise above my station any longer. The gap is too wide; the times are too fast.  I delayed my return to Greenville, one day at first, then another, then a week. I stopped preparing for the LSAT, then I stopped reading, then I stopped writing. As life turned mechanical, the most important gears ground to a halt. By September, my family, close friends, and running were the only things keeping me from an emotional breakdown.

        

          Suicide is a complex and terrible thing, one that few are quick to discuss openly. It’s easy to recite the platitudes of grief as if a rosary, to cling to them just the same, but it’s far harder to meet this sort of bereavement in full stride. It places you in open dialogue with your own mortality in a way that accidents or illness never can. A freak car accident, a sudden heart attack, a terminal cancer—actuaries might call them “acts of God’—are perhaps easier to accept, though never easy.  Such were my uncle’s death by pancreatic cancer and my grandfathers’, both by heart failure. We carve space for the vagaries and contingencies of life and the inevitability of death, but we seldom make provision for self-destruction. When it happens, you can speculate about true intentions and mental illness, search for mitigation in toxicology reports, construct a narrative and try to ignore the bits and pieces that don't fit. But there is no process, no protocol: grieving a suicide is intimately personal and often tragically solitary.

         There is no getting over loss, only living with absence. I feel guilty. I feel angry. I wonder when long becomes too long. I fear a time when his death may become a convenient alibi for my own anxieties and fears, my excuse to again retreat from life.

Most of all, I miss my friend.
       

          There isn't a happy ending or silver lining to this story, only a new beginning to my own.  To carry a legacy of life, not of death, of gain, not of loss, is the final charge.  If you ask me how I’m doing, I’ll probably say that I’m doing alright, and that’s good enough for now. What better way to live and to heal than to chase down some dreams with a remarkable group of athletes and coaches. The retreat is over, and I'm not taking another step back. 

It’s great to be alive.

Sincerely,

Lee Gilmer, 10/24/13


P.S. Congratulations to the Furman men and women for their performances at the SoCon Championship—It was a privilege to watch you fight for every spot and make history down in Birmingham.

The Blueprint

Let me first introduce myself. My name is Wilkerson Given. I am from Birmingham, Alabama and I graduated from Furman. Growing up in the south, I have always loved the outdoors and Alabama football. I do not, however, eat most southern food, which is probably why I’m still alive. Although southern food is great and my mom has the best recipe for cheese grits in the world, I don’t eat it. I am also not a heart breaker.

            

My decision to want to pursue post collegiate running came midway through my senior season. After a hard working summer and fall cross country season under the direction of Coach Gary and Coach Neal, my appetite to compete and succeed grew tremendously. Although I have always had a competitive nature, seeing how consistent hard work in the right direction can pay off really made me want to continue and push to be the best I am able. Starting a new event my senior year also generated excitement and the possibility for big improvement. Thus after talking to Coach Gary and expressing my desire to go catch my dream (chasing implies you will never reach your goal), he kindly took me into the group. 

            

Alright, enough about me. Let’s talk Furman Elite and briefly about what is up with the FBS and FCS (Furman is in the FCS, otherwise no one cares). Furman elite is having a great year so far. Having recently moved into the heart of fall training after several weeks of buildup, the group is working hard and getting focused. With the increase in size of the group, the intensity and passion is undoubtedly more palpable. Every person (or dog, what’s up Brail) in the group brings something uniquely positive and when added together, great things are bound to happen. As they say, there is power in numbers. This year is looking to be unbelievably believable.

            

As for college football, things are looking up as well. Furman put up somewhat of a fight against LSU and Alabama is in their rightful place in the rankings. The second place position, however, is open for debate. FSU? Oregon? Ohio State? Doesn’t really matter but if it were based on band prowess, Ohio State would be a lock. That band is incredible. I am certainly hoping for an Alabama, Ohio State title game but everybody in the country loves Oregon so whatever. 

On to the next one,

Wilkerson