Sundown at the bazaar is a strange time. It’s impractical for most of the vendors to try to carry on after dark, so when the sun starts to disappear behind the mountains, that’s the home stretch. For the food vendors especially, they don’t want to have to take home a load of produce that may not be in salable condition the next day. So in an effort to get rid of it, they drop their prices to rock bottom. Of course, everyone knows this is how it works, so people wait until sundown to come out and do their food shopping.

That last bazaar rush of the day is mayhem, and for an introvert like me, it’s also hellish. I’ll pay the extra ten pennies per kilo for onions in order not to have to deal with mobs of shouting people, pushing and shoving and getting in each other’s way. I’m happy to go late morning or early afternoon, and get the choice of the produce without having to fight other people for the best of what’s left.

At closing, some vendors find they haven’t sold all their stock, but financially it’s not worth it for them to lug it all back home. So they leave it on the sidewalk— huge piles of tomatoes, oranges, and whatever else didn’t sell. You’d think there’d be a mad rush for all this free stuff, but no. It’s a kind of unspoken rule that the leftover food on the sidewalk, still in perfect condition, is for those who can’t afford to pay. Well into the night, the poorest families and the homeless rummage through the piles of vegetables and fruits, filling huge bags until they have what they need for the week. No one stops them or bothers them. They come in quietly, they leave quietly, and by morning all the food is gone.

I didn’t photograph the night shoppers, though it would have been easy enough; I think if you’re willing to swallow your pride and accept free food on the sidewalk to feed your family, then I’ll give you the dignity of not being cheap blog fodder. We all do what we need to do to take care of our own. Nothing wrong with that.

My first day in England was eye-opening. I had been told to dress comfortably for international travel, and so I had worn my standard Texas errand-running uniform— denim shorts and a t-shirt. It was great for the flight, but when I arrived in Manchester the following morning, David, who picked me up at the airport, looked at me and laughed.

“You’ll probably want to dig your coat out of your suitcase before we go outside,” he said.

I squinted at him and tried to assess if he was joking or not. Surely he didn’t really mean I needed to wear a coat. It’s frickin March, for god’s sake! On what planet would one even need to think about a coat in March? I mean, we’re almost in summer, what the hell?

I decided he was trying to trick me with this coat nonsense, which was just as well because I didn’t actually have a coat. There was probably a light jacket packed in with my cargo stuff, but that was on a pallet somewhere waiting to board a freight plane in San Antonio. In my suitcases I had only packed all the obvious stuff one would need in March: shorts, t-shirts, flip-flops, bikinis. It was, after all, nearly spring break, and since I was told we lived near the coast I figured the beaches would be packed within another week or two. Obviously I didn’t have a job, so I was planning on spending my days relaxing and enjoying the rest of spring. Hence the wardrobe choices.

David begged me, “please, let me buy you a coat in the airport.” I laughed at how far he was taking the prank. No one buys clothes at airport prices. Then he offered me his coat, and that’s when I noticed all the other people carrying coats. In March.

I started to wonder how many people were in on the joke.

Then we stepped outside the airport and a blast of wind and freezing rain shrapnel pelted me in the legs and sent my hair flying 90 degrees out to the side.

David told me to go back inside, and he went and got the car.

During the drive to Blackpool I gazed in utter amazement at the weather. David half-joked that I was probably wanting to go back to Texas. What he didn’t know is that all my life, I had pretty much been confined indoors in front of the air-conditioner from April until October, because I have never been able to handle heat. It makes me crazy to the point where I want to take hostages. I’m not a fan of direct sunlight, it hurts my eyes, and I sweat so easily that even mildly warm days reduce me to a stinky, soaked-through, dripping mess. I hate summer, have always hated it, and I had no idea that there were places outside Antarctica where one could find cool weather in the summer.

So England was heaven.

Then I saw a field with little white dots scattered across it. It was hard to see what they were through the rain-spattered car window. I wondered, but I didn’t think too much about it. Then a mile or so up the road I saw another field of white dots. What the hell could that be? I rolled down my window a tiny bit to peek out.

Teeny tiny eensy weensy baby sheepies.

I squealed. I’d never seen any sheep at all before in real life, much less bebeh ones. To this day, that is my fondest memory of “how stuff is in England.” In March the landscape just erupts in tiny sheepies, everywhere. Everywhere, all over the whole damned island. It’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

Later I learned a very sobering lesson about not approaching the baby sheepies for cuddles, but I’ll save it for another time.

And that was my first couple of hours as an American living a non-American life.

Before I left to attend this meditation retreat, I mentioned that I had read many accounts of others who had also attended Goenka-sponsered Vipassana courses. Most of the reports were positive, some not so much. At the time I was really looking forward to being locked up for ten days with myself, and I pretty much rolled my eyes at the small percentage of accounts I read where people had come back traumatised or convinced they’d been unwittingly sucked into a cult. People on the internet are dramatic and crazy sometimes, you know? I never for a second predicted that I would jump on the “it might be a cult” bandwagon. After all, I’ve been practicing Vipassana for a year and expected that this retreat would be more of the same that I had already been doing, albeit on a more intense scale.

That was not what happened at all. This retreat was like no other meditation I had ever done. I think it’s possible (though I wouldn’t like to declare firmly either way) that perhaps Goenka is using legitimate Vipassana practice as a veil to conceal something entirely different that goes on at some of his retreats. So I decided to leave my retreat early, for my own emotional well-being, and I took a few days afterward to collect my thoughts and write them down. The result is the document below, which I’ve compiled into a handy PDF so you can download it and read it when you get a chance, or skip it if you’re not interested.

I would like to stress that I don’t believe my experience is at all a universal one, and if you are booked in or are planning on attending a Goenka retreat, I urge you not to cancel. Go, do the retreat and write up your own report when you get back. It will likely be wildly different from mine because no two experiences in this world can possibly be the same. You should never base your own spiritual path on anyone else’s, because we are all different and all perceive things differently. As my grandmother used to say, don’t let anyone else drive your bus. The majority of people who attend Goenka retreats come out refreshed and renewed. You’ll never know until you try.

So anyway, if you’ve got some time to kill, download the PDF and have a read. It’s a longish essay (22 pages), but with any luck you’ll find it entertaining (i.e. there are photos— I know where your buttons are). The layout is rough, even by my amateur standards, but hopefully the content doesn’t suffer as a result. Think of it as my personal “I nearly got sucked into a cult” scrapbook. Construction paper, glitter pens, and glue. One to show the grandkids.

I’m glad I got a chance to write this up now, because it served a double purpose: as a kind of closure for me, and as practice for the extreme amounts of writing I’ll be doing next month as part of NaNoWriMo (NaNoers: friend me and we’ll suffer together!). People have suggested that I use this essay itself as part of my novel, but alas, NaNoWriMo novels have to be fiction.

Please feel free to ask any questions or make comments; I think the goal of these things should always be to expand one’s knowledge and insight, and discussion is of course a big part of that.

The document itself is safe for work, though there are occasional swear words and a couple of analogies that you might not want your kids reading. But it’s not any worse than anything they’ll hear on prime-time TV tonight, and they might learn something.

I hope someone gets something out of my having written this, and I hope it doesn’t turn people off from Vipassana or meditation in general, both of which are legitimate, ancient practices with significant benefits to those who follow them. I still sit daily, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But as with any spiritual path, sometimes things branch off and some followers wander from the main road. That’s probably not a bad thing.

retreat.pdf

[871kb, control-click (right-click on a PC if anyone still uses those) and choose the appropriate "download" or "save" option— you guys are smart, you know how your browser works]

About a week ago the weather cooled down to the mid 30s (low 90s F) but the humidity soared. I didn’t handle it very well. As most of you know, like many Turkish households we don’t have an air conditioner, so we’re pretty much at the mercy of the fan and the weather. I got excited when I saw forecasts for temperatures I thought sounded reasonable, but my hopes were destroyed when the moisture in the air combined with the warm weather kept everything (including me) sticky and uncomfortable all the time. Add to this the fact that I was nursing a head cold, and the result wasn’t pretty.

When the temperature went back up to 50° (122°F) three days ago, I noted that I was actually a lot more comfortable, simply because the humidity had burned off. Sure, 50° is hot, but at least when the weather is dry the sweat evaporates quickly and you stay feeling somewhat clean, or as clean as can be expected considering your life has become a sauna.

Yesterday was an ugly combination of 43° and humid, which made last night nearly unbearable. Sauna turned quickly to steam room. I couldn’t get to sleep until almost 7:00 this morning.

And then at 9:00, the unthinkable happened— the electricity went out. This is something you just have to deal with when you make the decision to live in Turkey (I understand it’s much the same situation in India). The power grid isn’t up to handling the increasing numbers of air conditioners being installed in homes, and when the load gets to a certain point, the whole system just shuts down. Sometimes it’s only out for a few minutes; one time during my first summer here the power got knocked out for four days. You just never know. I tried to continue sleeping, knowing the best situation would be if I could wake up after the power was already back on and the fan was working again. That plan lasted about half an hour before I finally gave up and peeled myself off the damp bed. There’s no way I could ever sleep in this weather without the fan.

So there we were— no fan, no refrigerator, no freezer, not even any television or music or internet to distract us from the rapidly increasing humidity and heat. As temperatures soared up into the high 40s, I sat down at the balcony table and read a story in the newspaper about the several hundred heat-related deaths in eastern Europe this week. Great. I put the paper down and wandered around the house looking for the window with the best breeze coming through it. Nothing.

Noon came and went. Still no electricity. Missing my fan desperately and trying to take my mind off my pining, I read a magazine that a friend had given me two weeks ago and that had been sitting on my desk ever since. I slowly worked straight through from the first page all the way to the back cover. I pretended to be interested in the latest fashion trends, and marveled at the models on the pages, these miraculously sweat-free people who somehow managed to walk through a summer day without melting, smiles on their faces as if hot weather were something one could be remotely pleased about in some twisted alternate universe. I closed my eyes and dreamed of autumn, mentally working out how many days left until November.

At one point in the late afternoon my face was so red from the heat and sweat was running down my cheeks so quickly that my housemate asked if I was crying. Ha, as if I could muster the strength for a reaction that strong. I mumbled something indistinct and went back into my daze. It suddenly dawned on me that countries that observe siesta time don’t do so voluntarily— they simply slip into a heat coma during the hottest part of the day.

In the early evening, having exhausted our supply of newspapers and magazines, I found myself wandering around the house looking for something, anything to take my mind off the heat. Then, a miracle— I heard the alarm from the refrigerator, the beeping noise it makes when the temperature is too high inside. Electricity! I hurried into the kitchen, switched off the alarm, and dashed into the bedroom where my lovely fan was waiting for me. Sweet, sweet fan, how I missed you!

I noted the time— 19:03. We’d been without electricity for ten hours.

At least we’ll have the fan for sleeping tonight, with any luck…

Earlier this month I announced I was going to run a marathon next March, and then after having spent the following week or so floundering around buying things and trying to get my head around the enormity of the task, I realised I had no focus except the vague cloud of “marathon,” and as we all know if you focus on nothing, you’re sure to hit it (see also: several past marathon attempts, all with no clear plan and all ending in failure). So this past weekend I decided to get organised in order to gain confidence about the huge mountain of work ahead of me.

I always feel better when I get things written down— usually the situation is not as dire as I think it is once I see it all laid out in front of me. So in hopes of quelling my rumbling anxiety, on Saturday I started to make a training calendar (I used good ol’ iCal, since I wasn’t using my iCal for anything else). I started out by taking a notebook (a real one, you know, paper and all that) and writing down everything that I would work into a training schedule if the world were perfect and I had endless resources. I decided I wanted to do running (obviously), some other cardio activity (swimming seems obvious), some core stability training on the Swiss ball, yoga, and something involving meditation or some other kind of mental concentration discipline. As it turned out, when I mapped all these things out, they didn’t take up as much of a day as I expected. I can get them all done before lunch time and relax in the afternoon. I also made a space on my calendar to keep track of my weight and my daily food intake; if I’m going to launch myself around Antalya for 26 miles, I need to do myself the favour of getting the rest of this extra weight off. The exercise will help, certainly, but I need to stop shoveling goodies in my mouth like it’s Christmas.

The race is on a Sunday, so I designated Saturday as my full rest day, and when the time comes that long runs are a possibility, Sunday will be the day for those. There will also be a break from running on Wednesdays, which is when I’ll fit in the swimming or whatever I decide on. Swiss ball work and yoga (I subscribe to Yoga Today, which is free and unbelievably great) will happen every day of the week, as will meditation. Everything starts at low levels and builds gradually over time. When I added it up on Saturday, I learned that there were 260 days between then and the race. I was panicked about that before, but now that I have a written plan it appears to be plenty of time.

So I went out for my first “real” training run yesterday morning (Sunday, day 259 if you will). I set a goal for the week: by Friday, the last training run of the week, I want to be running 15 minutes non-stop. I’m not a beginning runner, but I am quite a bit out of practice, so I thought this was a reasonable goal.

Three minutes into my Sunday run I didn’t think my goal was so reasonable anymore. I started my run at 7:00 in the morning, and as soon as I hit the road I realised I’d started much too late. Already the heat and the sun were almost more than I could take, and I was feeling like a big fat radiator bouncing up and down the street. I finished the session without dying, but only just, and to be honest I walked most of it. Still, there’s only one first day of training, and it can only get better from there. I went home and did the rest of my training work and felt at least somewhat accomplished, but during the run I was really unhappy, and I didn’t feel much better about it afterwards.

Last night I thought a lot about how I could improve my approach. As a habit I listen to a lot of Gil Fronsdal’s teachings via Zencast. You don’t have to be a Buddhist (I’m not) to get into Vipassana meditation and the practical daily applications Zencast offers, and I recommend this podcast to anyone who wants to shake up their brain and explore something new. Gil talks a lot about “hanging out” with feelings as a coping device (a technique which is often used by mental health professionals to treat phobias). He uses the example of boredom and restlessness during meditation, and he advises that the best way to hang out with that is to label it in your head (”boredom,” “restlessness,”) and if you just keep hanging out and acknowledging those feelings by labeling them and accepting them rather than judging or acting on them, eventually the bell rings (to signify the end of the meditation period), and then you’re free to go and it turns out it didn’t kill you to sit there after all. I wondered if I could apply this technique to my unhappiness and frustration with running.

I knew that one thing I was going to have to do, aside from getting up earlier, was get rid of my timer. As I mentioned before, I already ditched my heart rate monitor months ago because it was making me obsessed with numbers instead of running. But on Sunday I noticed my watch was doing the same thing— I couldn’t stop myself from looking at it every three seconds to see if it was time to quit yet. That’s no fun, and it keeps my brain from being open to things like awareness of the feelings in my body and perhaps, god forbid, enjoying the scenery. But of course I still need a way to time my runs, so I came up with an idea: I made an iTunes playlist approximately 15 minutes long (this week I’m enjoying songs from the new Chemical Brothers album), and popped it onto the iPod Shuffle. I added a track of silence at the end to make sure I would know when to stop running. So now all I have to do is start the iPod when I start my run, and simply run until everything goes quiet. No watch to obsess over, and great music to run to. I decided to give it a try this morning and combine it with the “hanging out” and labeling techniques.

I went out at 4:50 this morning (day 258). The weather was much, much more tolerable. I walked for a minute or so, and then fired up the iPod as I started to run. Within a couple of minutes I was really unhappy and desperately wanted to slow to a walk again. I labeled those feelings in my head. “Unhappy.” “Tired.” “Want to quit.” “Fed up.” “Hate running.” “Unhappy.”

I know you all know the phenomenon by which repeating a word over and over causes the word to start mutating in your head, until it sounds alien and eventually loses all meaning. Well, today I discovered the same thing happens with labeling feelings. You really get into your labels, and the very act of labeling causes those labeled feelings to distort and then dissipate. So after a few minutes, “unhappy” and “tired” became “blank” and “I’m not sure what this one is. Neutral, I guess.” I labeled those feelings and hung out with them, too. Then some outside stuff I was experiencing started creeping into my labeling: “mountain.” “Brick wall.” “White cat.” “Chemical Brothers.” I felt myself smiling. “Smiling.” The fact that I was busy labeling things meant that I had no room in my head to tell myself all those stories about how I could just quit and go back to bed, or about how I’m too out of shape to run a marathon, or about how it’s ridiculous to put myself through this when I’m clearly not cut out for it. We all know the stories we make up in our heads, every excuse in the book about why we shouldn’t succeed at doing something difficult.

In fact, I was so busy labeling things that when the music came to a sudden halt I nearly tripped and fell over my own feet .

And that was it. On the second day of training I ran 15 minutes non-stop, accidentally. I wasn’t supposed to do that until Friday. And at the end of the run I was settled and happy and completely devoid of all the negative thoughts I’ve usually filled myself with by that point. My experiment worked. I’m going to try it again tomorrow.

I think I’ve really hit on something here— as I was walking home I thought to myself that if it weren’t for my current poor state of physical fitness, I might have continued to run like that for several hours, just noticing things and labeling them and not judging or criticising or feeling sorry for myself. Later in the day when I really didn’t want to do my yoga class, I labeled my way through that, as well, and honestly I think I connected with the poses today in a way I never have before. I’ve never paid this much attention in my life.

So I’m feeling good about this training stuff.

Incidentally, the new shoes are working out well so far— they’re a lot less like new shoes than most new shoes are. I do have a strange blister in the arch of my right foot, but I’m pretty sure that’s due to my flip-flops and not the runners. I’ll tape the blister for a couple of days and see what happens.

257 days to go. “Confident.”

At least once a week I get asked some variation on this question: what’s it like to live in an Arab country? Answer: I don’t know. I’ve never lived in an Arab country. But wait, Turks are Arabs, right?

No, that couldn’t be more wrong. But it seems to be such a common misconception that I thought I’d take a few minutes here to clarify a few points that often leave people confused:

1. Turkey is in the Middle East, and Middle East countries are by definition Arab. I know a lot of Turks who would disagree with the first part, and a lot of Israelis who would disagree with the second part. Not all Middle East countries are Arab, and many Turks think of Turkey as identifying more with Europe and other parts of Asia in terms of political and cultural likeness. I personally think of Turkey as a bridge between Europe and Asia, but there’s a lot of room for debate on that subject.
2. Even if you don’t call it a Middle Eastern country, Turkey is still adjacent to all those Arab countries, and Turks are mostly Muslim, so they must be pretty much the same as Arabs. That’s like saying that Germans must be French because their country is adjacent to France and they’re Christian just like the French. Turks are, ethnically speaking, Ural-Altaic peoples, more closely related to Mongols and Chinese than to Arabs. In fact, historically the line between “Mongolian” and “Turkish” is rather blurred. In Western schoolbooks we tend to identify Genghis Khan and Attila The Hun as Mongols; most Turks see those figures as Turkish or at the very least, Turkic (and though Turkic they certainly are, “Turkish” is a more dynamic term and may or may not apply).
3. Like all Middle Eastern peoples, Turks speak Arabic, so that makes them Arab. This is just flat-out wrong. Although it’s doubtless that some Turks do know how to speak Arabic, the language of the Turkish people is, oddly enough, Turkish. Turkish (wiki) is an Altaic language, which linguistically has more in common with Korean or Japanese than it does with Arabic. Arabic is a Semitic language, more closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic (wiki), and having very little to do with any Altaic language, much less any Turkic one. I think where the confusion lies with this is that most Turks are Muslim, and Arabic is the language of Islam, and many people confuse religion with ethnicity. Also, up until 1928 most Turkish speakers wrote their language using Ottoman script, which to an untrained eye looks indistinguishable from Arabic. But in modern times Turkish is written using the Latin alphabet, albeit with a few modified characters.
4. Turks look like Arabs, so it’s an easy mistake to make. Have a look at the photo above, taken in eastern Turkey by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Do those men look Arab to you? Of course not. And even within the group, their facial features cover a range from European all the way to East Asian. The truth is, Turks vary in appearance greatly throughout the country— some have fair skin and light hair, others have dark skin and light eyes, and still others have features like those found in Altaic peoples thousands of kilometres east of Turkey. That’s not to say that some Turks don’t resemble some Arabs, but then again I know a few Germans whom one might mistake for French at a glance. It doesn’t mean it’s okay to lump them all together.

As a bit of a side anecdote, by coincidence I stumbled upon a forum a few weeks ago (sorry, I can’t remember the url) where a Korean man was making some very interesting points about ethnicity versus cultural development in Asia. At one point he was giving some narrative background about Turkic languages and Turkic peoples, and then someone else in the conversation used the term “Central Asia,” which set the Korean guy off on a huge discourse about how the whole concept of “Central Asia” was an invention by the Russians to try to solidify the Soviet hold on those areas, and that if it weren’t for the tremendous Soviet pressure on those nations to conform to Russian culture and language, i.e. if they’d all been left to progress “naturally,” then we’d probably now be referring to that entire gigantic region as the United Nations of Turkistan. Someone then asked the guy exactly where he would draw the borders of this theoretical Turkistan, and the Korean man suggested that even Korea and Japan wouldn’t be out of the question. He mentioned that when he and his family had visited eastern Turkey, they often got mistaken for Turkish because their facial structure is so similar to the Turks living in that area.

This got me to thinking about my own observations over the past few months, starting back when I discovered the Azerbaijani television network and was shocked to hear that the spoken language would be nearly indistinguishable from Turkish if it weren’t for those Russian-sounding words they throw in from time to time. And they’re starting to use a Roman script like we do, but when they were Soviet they were forced to use a Cyrillic script, and in addition some of them still use an Arabic-based script as well. But the spoken Azeri language is pretty much like Turkish (I imagine that this is much like the minor differences between spoken Norwegian and spoken Swedish). Same goes for Kazakh, and Turkmen, and Uzbek— Emirhan says he can understand people in all those languages, with some minor vocabulary adjustments.

So that got me thinking about how far east the similarities would carry, and I went to YouTube and started watching some Mongolian programming… unbelievable. I expected it to sound something like my stereotype of Mandarin Chinese, but it doesn’t— rather it sounds a lot like Turkish with some heavy Russian influences (some of the grammatical structures are Indo-European rather than Ural-Altaic, but only some). I was shocked at how much I understood. Also, one of my friends who comes from the western part of China speaks a regional Chinese dialect that she claims is “so close to Turkish, it’s scary.” She said she’s actually had small conversations with Turks and been able to hobble along with basic to moderate understanding.

I don’t know much Korean or Japanese, but Emirhan said Japanese people who speak Turkish almost never have a strong foreign accent. They sound like Turks. And the few Japanese people I’ve met here who learned Turkish have all said that it was an easy language for them to learn, and the pronunciations came naturally. I don’t know any Koreans in Turkey, so I can’t comment on that, but I know what the guy on the forum means when he says that some Koreans and some eastern Turks get mistaken for one another. And it’s possible that you could throw a couple of Mongolians into the picture and still be unsure as to who comes from where. This is one of the reasons why Turks get so annoyed when Westerners assume that “Turkish” and “Arab” are the same thing. Turks have more in common with the East Asians than they do with the Arabs. The only thing Turks ever shared with Arabia was a writing system, and even that’s now long gone, as it never really suited the Turkish language well anyway.

It all gets even more spooky when I think back to a year or so ago when I thought Emirhan was pulling my leg about this supposed theory that Native Americans are Turkic, and then when I did the research to back up my claim that he was talking nonsense, I discovered instead that in several ancient Native American languages, the word for “sky” is the same as the Turkish word, and the words for many of the colours are the same as in Turkish, and so on. Apparently a lot of experts in the field agree that these Americans also orginate from somewhere in the United Nations of Turkistan. And then there are the similarities in some of the faces— again with the high cheekbones and the slightly angled rectangular eyes. Of course I can’t say for sure that that’s where Native Americans came from, but certainly it’s an interesting theory.

So back to my originial point, if you were unsure before about whether Turkey was an Arab country, hopefully I’ve cleared that up. But even if you were familiar with Turkish ethnicity before now, perhaps it’s still worth a look at some online resources if you’re curious to learn more about the great mystery of these highly nomadic and charismatic people. I, for one, am always on the lookout for new clues, but I’m not kidding myself— this is a puzzle that will never be completely solved.

The main point of our shopping trip yesterday was that I needed new running shoes. My Asics are not all that old, but there were a few issues. One, they’re men’s shoes (I have wide feet, and many times men’s shoes fit me better), and so I always thought they were ugly, even uglier than running shoes usually are… there must be some law that says running shoes can’t be sexy, because every running shoe in history has been ugly. Two, Emirhan’s always had his eye on my Asics— he wears them about as often as I do, and since his feet are bigger than mine, the shoes are now loose and slip a lot. His excuse when borrowing my shoes was that he was planning on buying me a new pair anyway, so yesterday I finally gave him my Asics for good and held him to his promise of getting me some new runners.

I never thought in a million years I’d own a pair of running shoes by Adidas. Even Asics was a bit pop-culturey for me; normally I go for Brooks or New Balance or something geeky like that. But yesterday when I saw these A3 GigaRides in the Adidas store, I couldn’t believe how cool they looked. I told myself that silver running shoes this sweet could not possibly be suitable for actual training. Everyone knows that quality running shoes are required to be ugly. But I decided to try the A3s on and see what they felt like.

I was shocked— they felt great. They’re a better fit than the Asics and they offer more support. They were comfortable and performed well in my (albeit weak) test run through the store. They were ridiculously expensive, but that’s just a fact of life with running shoes, and Emirhan’s opinion was that if I liked them so much and they were going to help me get through my training, then they kind of pay for themselves in usefulness. So we bought them. I’m giggling with Product Love. I can’t wait to start training in earnest.

And speaking of training… I had a long talk with an old friend of mine, a guy who has known me since I was a teenager and is familiar with how I work best and where my strong and weak points are. Coincidentally, he is also an Iron Man triathlete and accomplished distance runner, so he knows a thing or two about running as well. I contacted him because I had done a lot of research on the internet about marathon training and preparation and had discovered that marathons and pregnancy have a lot in common— everyone on the internet has a different opinion about the best way to proceed, they’re all willing to fight like pit bulls about it, and in the end I just end up thinking that none of these people are me, none of them can possibly know the unique requirements of my specific person, and perhaps I’m better off making my own decisions, regardless how ill-advised. After all, that’s how I ended up in Turkey, and Europe before that— by going against what everyone thought was right for me and sticking to my gut instincts. In fact, that’s how I’ve made most of the major decisions of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever chosen the popular option. So I asked my friend what his take on the training issue was.

To my surprise, he agreed with me. He said I should spend less time listening to the advice of others and more time trusting what my body tells me. I’m not new to running, so it’s not like I need someone to hold my hand through every little step of training. He said that if more runners would spend less time making up arbitrary blanket “rules” of training and more time focusing on their individual needs (which by definition will never match anyone else’s on the planet), there would be a lot more people capable of finishing super events like the Iron Man. Problem is, people try to make middle-of-the-road guidelines that fit everyone, and the result is exactly that: middle-of-the-road. Mediocre all around. No one standing out in any way.

So that decided it for me. I’m going to do what I always do with everything: take what I’ve learned from various sources and combine bits of this and pieces of that and make my own special regime. It may not suit anyone else, but it’s going to suit me. It will incorporate all the running I need and all the rest I require. It will also include supplementary training like yoga and meditation (I’m a big believer that endurance starts from a the metaphysical rather than the physical). It will be tightly organised around a modified diet and lifestyle. When March rolls around, I am going to be a marathoning machine from top to bottom, focused and prepared. I may not be the fastest runner on the race day, but that’s okay. I’m there to win in a different way.

So there you have it. I’ve got all the gear I need, and I have a plan— now I just need to get to work.

I’m going to bed early tonight and setting the alarm for the crack of dawn. My new shoes need breaking in.

Running and I have one of those love-hate relationships that makes you roll your eyes. We argue a lot. We break up. We get back together. It’s good for a while. Then I cheat. Then we break up again. Two weeks later, he calls me wanting to forgive and forget. We get back together. This is how it’s been for years.

It started back when I was a kid. I was quite an athletic child, always top of my class in gymnastics and accomplished in several styles of dance. When we had those standardised fitness tests in school, I always came out at the head of the chin-ups and sit-ups charts. I was also a very strong swimmer and played softball for a couple of seasons when I was nine or ten.

But running was a different story. We used to have to run the mile in phys ed, and for some reason I could never do it. I’d get about a quarter of the way and be in such agony that I had to lie down, on the track if necessary. My legs felt fine; it was my lungs that were screaming for me to stop. My P.E. teachers always said that it was because I was out of shape, but I didn’t see how that could be possible— I was an active child who was exercising everyday. To this day I wonder if I had some kind of asthma or other condition that kept me from completing the mile like everyone else. Even the little weaklings in my class could run the mile, but I just lay on the ground gasping for breath, my lungs on fire.

It annoyed me that I couldn’t do it, so running became this Thing with me. I looked for ways around the breathing issue. The obvious choice was to not run such a long way. I have strong legs, and I quickly discovered that I could sprint well over short distances. In high school I became quite good at the 50 and 100 yard races. I could even pull off a 400 if I had to, but that was my limit. Any more than that and I couldn’t handle the breathing.

As I phased into adulthood and left structured exercise classes behind, I started to wonder if I could train myself to run further. Over the years I’ve struggled with this— I’ve managed a couple of 5ks in my time, but nothing longer than that. My breathing problems settled down a bit as I got older, though I still struggle to some extent. When I was in my early 20s, I started to get this idea in my head that I wanted to run a marathon, to prove to Running that it was I who was the boss of him and not the other way around. I made plan after plan to run various marathons. In every case, I’d let my training get to the point where I could run about 5k, and then I’d plateau and eventually give up.

So now I’m 34, still running semi-regularly for fitness, still not breaking the 5k barrier. I had kind of decided that maybe I was just a 5k runner and there wasn’t any horizon past that.

Then, back in March of this year I discovered that we have a marathon right here in Antalya. Right here in my face where I can’t ignore it. Because I’m a location blogger, it made sense to cover the event. I got a press pass from the organisers, and Emirhan and I rode the press bus all the way around the course during the race. This was the first time I’d ever seen a marathon in real life, and I was both inspired and frightened by what I saw. Those who finished did so in great agony, and some of the unlucky ones were picked up on the course by ambulances. It made me wonder why people put themselves through it. It also made me wonder if I should take up marathon training again.

After the race Emirhan and I had a talk. He’s a bodybuilder and athlete himself, and seeing the marathon up close really made him want to do it. I shared with him the story of my lifelong battle to run. We sort of shrugged and said, “maybe next year,” but at that time we had some tentative plans to do some traveling abroad and we didn’t think we’d be here in March 2008. In any case, we made a vague promise that if those travel plans fell through, then we’d definitely do the Antalya marathon instead.

Well, this week we learned that we won’t be abroad after all. We’ll be right here in Antalya in March of next year. So I guess that means we’re officially training for the marathon now.

I’m terrified. I’m going to take some convincing. I’m not worried about Emirhan— he’s unbelievably fit and could probably run the marathon tomorrow. But I don’t want him to have to worry about me. I want to be prepared enough so that he can concentrate on his own race (which will be over much sooner than mine) and I can concentrate on what I’m doing.

This means I have to start training now. Summer is coming, and with it the 50-degree heat that Antalya is famous for (that’s 122, folks). Can I train in those conditions? Maybe, if I train at five in the morning. Am I going to encounter lung issues again? I won’t know until I start running longer distances. Maybe I’ll have to see a doctor about that. I’ll definitely have to get some new running shoes. Some good socks. Maybe a couple of cute outfits to motivate me. And I’m going to have to keep a serious eye on what I’m eating.

Having said that, I don’t want to get so obsessed with all those things that the fun gets sucked out of running. I actually enjoy running now, and if something stops being enjoyable then I just won’t do it, end of story. I already gave up my heart rate monitor because it was turning me into a numbers freak instead of a runner. So I have to strike a balance. I know that for me, my internet support network is important. I have lots of online friends who know lots of stuff about running, and I’ll be calling on them when times are tough. I’ll probably also join whatever social networks I run across. I’ll find ways to keep this fun.

I still don’t quite believe I’m up for this, but maybe that’s just because I’m tired today and even doing the laundry seems like a lot of effort. Everyone I’ve asked so far thinks I’m definitely capable of running the full distance, so that’s a good sign. I have very supportive friends. Now I just need to find it in me to live up to my half of the bargain. Watch this space. But until further notice, you should consider this an official declaration of my intention to run 26.2 miles here in Antalya on the 2nd of March next year. It makes me nervous just to say that. Yikes.

I mentioned a couple of days ago about my annoyance with fad diets… it still amazes me that even in this age of information, reasonably intelligent adults will go on fad diet after fad diet, lose weight and then immediately gain it all back again plus an extra twenty pounds, and still latch onto whatever the next fad diet is as if this one is going to be the one. As my doctor once told me, “if any diet worked, there would only be that one diet, and it would be called The Diet, and everyone in the world would be on it and there wouldn’t be any fat people.” Well said. I’m constantly baffled at the awful things people will do to their organs and systems (ketosis, anyone? my stepmother got ill from that) because they think a fad diet will solve all their problems.

The above picture is me, believe it or not, back in December 2003, just before I moved to Turkey. I was 240 pounds (109 kilograms) in that photo. I came to Turkey in May of 2004, and by the one-year anniversary of the above photo (i.e. in December 2004), I was down to 160 pounds (you can see a current photo of me on the about page).

So how did I do it? Well, I promise you I wouldn’t have kept the weight off this long if I’d lost it on a fad diet. No, it was moving to Turkey that did it, the entire lifestyle change. Especially when I first moved here, I had some friends who ran a restaurant up the road from me, and I ate there all the time because I don’t cook. I didn’t know how to ask for things in Turkish (still don’t to a great extent), and so I just had to eat whatever they brought me, which was the same thing they were all eating— lean meat or fish, rice, and salad. I didn’t know how to ask for sauce or mayonnaise. I didn’t know how to ask for seconds. So I didn’t have any of those things. I also didn’t have my car (I sold it when I moved to Turkey), so I walked everywhere. Everywhere.

I also didn’t have my scale, so at first I didn’t notice what was happening, but eventually it became clear that my big-girl clothes were falling off of me. So I bought some smaller stuff. And then two months later I had to buy smaller clothes again. And again. And now, three years later, I can’t remember what it was like to drive everywhere, to drive to a restaurant and order a giant meal with gravy all over everything. I still walk most everywhere, and I still eat the standard lean-and-healthy Turkish fare.

When I tell people how fat I used to be, at first they’re surprised, but then they say, “oh yes, of course you were fat, you’re American.” But that is their mistaken stereotype— I was never fat when I lived in the United States. I didn’t get fat until I moved to England in 1998. Gravy and creamy sauces are very popular in England, as are fried potatoes (or some other kind of potato) with every restaurant meal. I’m a fan of all of those things, and if you offer them to me, I’m going to eat them (or at least, I would have at that time). Another unfair stereotype is that English food is bland and tasteless— I can assure you that’s not the case. England has some of the most amazing restaurants in the world. I should know, I ate at most of them. It took me six years to gain all that weight, and not a pound of it was gained on U.S. soil.

So I guess what I’m saying is that although it may seem like an extreme solution to sell your car and move to a Mediterranean country where you don’t speak the language in order to train yourself to change your lifestyle and eating habits, it is one way to do it, and though for me it was an accidental side effect, I’m so thankful to Turkey and Turkish cuisine for helping me pull myself together and realise what a toll Western overeating and laziness had taken on my body. I do still enjoy my treats, but I walk them off, and I now understand the importance of moderation and balance in my meals. For me, this is a change for life.

One of my favourite day trips is the four-hour drive down the winding coastal road to Kaş, and then a short boat trip across the bay to the island of Kastellorizo, which the Turks call Meis. Meis is the closest Greek island to where I live, and as such is also the closest opportunity for me to take advantage of duty-free shopping and freely available pork products. Also, it’s simply a gorgeous place to visit, which is just as well because these visits are a fact of life for those of us with visa restrictions who have to leave Turkey every three months. I’ve been doing these trips quarterly for two years, and every time I visit Meis I discover something new.

The last time I took a boat to Meis it was a lovely, warm spring day and I was in an exploring mood. The tiny village where the boat docks is where most people hover and shop and eat while waiting for the boat to go back to Turkey; I’m usually among them but today I’m feeling adventurous and the weather is perfect for hiking. The boat captain tells us we have two hours before we head back. I glance up at the smallish mountain that hugs the village to the bay, and as soon as I see an alley that leads upward, I disappear between buildings to discover what’s backstage.

Even though there’s a mystery pain building up in the toes and the ball of my left foot, it still only takes me about twenty minutes to get to some level ground at the top of the first peak. This island is just a series of tiny mountains that are easily navigable on foot. At this plateau I discover several abandoned restaurants (presumably this is because the sun is out and Greeks, like most Mediterraneans, are nocturnal), a school house, and something that looks like it used to be a governmental building but now bears no signs of life.

The Greek word for “thank you” is efharisto. If I live to be a hundred I will never forget this word, because I had it indelibly burned into my brain by an English friend of mine many years ago, right before the first time I ever went to Greece. He said to me, “think of it as ‘Ed Harris toe,’ but switch the D sound for an F.” Efharisto. See? Now you’ll never forget it, either.

On my way down the other side of the mountainette, I start to encounter locals. Mediterranean people are generally chatty, which makes me nervous. I’m an introvert, and even if we include efharisto I can still count all the Greek words I know on one hand with fingers left over. So I’m hoping to avoid conversation. I realise my fears are unfounded as I pass several people who simply raise one hand up in a gesture of greeting as they continue to gaze at the ground and keep walking. This is my kind of place.

When I reach sea level again I find myself at a village marina that’s a carbon copy of the one where our boat is docked, except this village is a ghost town. There are a few work crews set up inside the shells of newly-constructed buildings, but they’re off home on their lunch breaks, and that means this marina is silent. There are no tourists, no boats, not even any residents— just a mixture of older buildings and half-built newer ones. It looks like someone has built a 1:1 model of the other marina but hasn’t gotten around to painting the figurines of the people yet. I’m alone here, and it feels great. I start to look for a place where I can sit down and rest my aching foot, which has now progressed to the throbbing stage around my toes.

I make my way down following the curve of the marina to the other side, where I had already spotted a small park with benches and the entrance to what appears to be a cemetary. Next to the cemetary is one of the smallest churches I’ve ever seen, glowing white and pristine. This must be where funerals happen. It probably doubles as a wedding chapel and a house for Sunday services as well. The front door is open, but I don’t go inside. I went to Catholic school; I’ve been in enough small churches to last me a lifetime.

When I reach the bayside park I settle down on one of benches and remove my left shoe to examine my foot. There’s some redness and swelling at the extremities, a dull pulsing ache, and a bit of itchiness. Surely these are early symptoms of Ed Harris Toe. I decide my condition is not terminal and put my shoe back on. I’m far from my starting point and I don’t want to miss the boat back to Turkey.

I walk back via a different route from the way I came, which isn’t as interesting as I thought it would be because I just end up at the same plateau with the same school house, and then back down to the old village where my fellow tourists are waiting at the same café where I left them. Everything is in slow motion, almost paused. The sun is shining, people are still, hardly anyone moves except to breathe. My interest in exploring has been overridden by the blazing sunlight, and I’m feeling lazy now. I meander back to the boat for a nap.

When I wake up I hear music and a mild commotion, and I can feel the boat is moving along the water. As I open my eyes the first thing I see is a glass of red wine being thrust at me. “Drink, Melissa?” the boat captain asks. Sure, why not. The captain has received a gift from a friend on the island, a five-litre box of Greek wine with a tap, and he’s in a sharing mood. As I look around, I see the source of the commotion— the other passengers have a three-glass headstart on me and have broken into spontaneous dancing on the deck. The radio is blaring some cheesy Turkish pop, and the whole thing looks like a Devo video as the dancers lurch and jerk trying to stay upright against the irregular bobbing of the ship against the waves. I’m not particularly in a dancing mood, and since I have to drive back to Antalya I won’t be drinking enough wine to put myself in a dancing mood. I nurse my single glass of wine and chill on my sun lounger until we arrive back in Kaş.

Emirhan greets me at the dock and welcomes me back to Turkey. I’ve always wanted to take him to Meis with me but EU visas for Turks are prohibitively expensive and difficult to get, especially when you consider that we’d only be in Greece for a few hours. Still, I look forward to the day when we can explore the island together. Meis is one of my favourite places and I’d like to share that with him. There’s so much of the island I still haven’t seen— since my last visit I’ve learned of a cave on the other side of the island that you can only get to by boat, with a secret entrance and a hidden swimming lagoon and some sort of mysterious blue luminescence. It sounds like something from a Drangonlance novel, but there are enough references to it online that I believe the place actually exists. Perhaps when I go back to Meis in the summer I’ll see if I can find a local boat to take me over there so I can check it out for myself. Meis never fails to surprise and delight me, even after two years. That’s the sign of a healthy relationship.

[photos by Taylan Sen]