Liza Howard

Liza Howard

Liza Howard is a long-time is a longtime ultrarunner who lives in San Antonio, Texas. She teaches for NOLS Wilderness Medicine, coaches, directs the non-profit Band of Runners, and drives her kids around in a minivan.

September 2015
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Trail Camp “This I Believe Project” and Ode to Alison

LizaLiza

I’m asking all the mentors, past and present, for the Team RWB Trail Camp to record a story about one of their ultrarunning adventures.  More than just telling an entertaining story, though, I’m asking them to share a fundamental belief they arrived at because of ultrarunning or the ultrarunning community – or a belief that was reinforced by their running.  It’ll be modeled on Edward R. Morrow’s This I Believe project from the 1950s.  I wanted to find a way to make the impact of these runners’ mentorship more lasting.  Murrow’s This I Believe project seems like the perfect format to create a lasting transference piece.

Here’s a video of Murrow describing the project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMNw7M-eUdU 

The full transcript is at the bottom of this post.

And here are three recent This I Believe recordings from NPRs reboot of the project.

“Be Cool to the Pizza Delivery Dude,” Sarah Adams: https://thisibelieve.org/essay/23/

“The Peace That Comes From Animals,” Chris: https://thisibelieve.org/essay/1632/

“Creating Our Own Happiness,” Wayne Coyne: https://thisibelieve.org/essay/24791/

I’ve asked everybody to prepare a 3-minute story and then record it on their phones and send it to me. Eric Schranz of ultrarunnerpodcast.com is going to help me put everything together.

I’d love to hear what you blog readers would have to say.  If you want to record your story and send it to me, please do.  (I’ll probably be pestering some of you for stories soon anyway.)

Here are some guidelines from the thisibelieve.org website with a few additions for the Trail Camp’s purposes.

Tell a story about you [and your running]: Be specific. [What race, what trail, what climb etc.) Take your belief out of the ether and ground it in the events that have shaped your core values. Consider moments when belief was formed or tested or changed. [When I was lying on the side of the trail…] Think of your own experience, work, and family, and tell of the things you know that no one else does. Your story need not be heart-warming or gut-wrenching—it can even be funny—but it should be real. Make sure your story ties to the essence of your daily life philosophy and the shaping of your beliefs.

Be brief: Your statement should be between 500 and 600 words. That’s about three minutes when read aloud at your natural pace.

Name your belief: If you can’t name it in a sentence or two, your essay might not be about belief. Also, rather than writing a list, consider focusing on one core belief.

Be positive: Write about what you do believe, not what you don’t believe. Avoid statements of religious dogma, preaching, or editorializing.

Be personal: Make your essay about you; speak in the first person. Avoid speaking in the editorial “we.” Tell a story from your own life [training or racing]; this is not an opinion piece about social ideals. Write in words and phrases that are comfortable for you to speak. We recommend you read your essay aloud to yourself several times, and each time edit it and simplify it until you find the words, tone, and story that truly echo your belief and the way you speak.

Edward R. Murrow:

“This I Believe. By that name, we present the personal philosophies of thoughtful men and women in all walks of life. In this brief space, a banker or a butcher, a painter or a social worker, people of all kinds who need have nothing more in common than integrity, a real honesty, will write about the rules they live by, the things they have found to be the basic values in their lives.

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion—a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.

Around us all, now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog, there is an enveloping cloud of fear. There is a physical fear, the kid that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the ground in the bottom of a Montana valley like prairie dogs, to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and the fury of the A-bombs or the hell-bombs, or whatever may be coming.

There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down this house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt, doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we had long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.

What truths can a human being afford to furnish the cluttered nervous room of his mind with, when he has no real idea how long a lease he has on the future? It is to try to meet the challenge of such questions that we have prepared these pieces. It has been a difficult task and a delicate one. Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren’t interested in), people don’t speak their beliefs easily, or publicly.

In a way, our project has been an invasion of privacy, like demanding that a man let a stranger read his mail. General Lucius Clay remarked that it would hardly be less embarrassing for an individual to be forced to disrobe in public than to unveil his private philosophy. Mrs. Roosevelt hesitated a long time. “What can I possibly say that will be of any value to anybody else?” she asked us. And a railway executive in Philadelphia argued at first that he might as well try to engrave the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin as to attempt to discuss anything thoughtfully in the space of five minutes. Yet these people and many more have all made distinctive contributions of their beliefs to the series.

You will hear from that inspiring woman, Helen Keller, who despite her blindness, has lived a far richer life than most of us; from author Pearl Buck; sculptor William Zorach: businessmen and labor leaders, teachers and students.

Perhaps we should warn you that there is one thing you won’t read, and that is a pat answer for the problems of life. We don’t pretend to make this a spiritual or psychological patent-medicine chest where one can come and get a pill of wisdom, to be swallowed like an aspirin, to banish the headaches of our times.

This reporter’s beliefs are in a state of flux. It would be easier to enumerate the items I do not believe in, than the other way around. And yet in talking to people, in listening to them, I have come to realize that I don’t have a monopoly on the world’s problems. Others have their share, often far bigger than mine. This has helped me to see my own in truer perspective: and in learning how others have faced their problems–this has given me fresh ideas about how to tackle mine.”

And last: Ode to Alison.  Alison Bryant co-directs the Trail Camp with me along with her husband Jason and Joe and Joyce Prusaitis.  Anyway, Alison never toots her own horn, and so I want to do that now.  TOOOOOOOOOT!!!  Everything good you hear about this camp and its usefulness to RWB is due to her hard work.  I am going to miss having an excuse to talk to her regularly when this camp is over.  (And I’m not just saying this because she named one of her goats after Asa.)

 

Comments 3
  • Alison
    Posted on

    Alison Alison

    Reply Author

    Aw, thanks. Truth is I am just an obsessive compulsive planner. But this is going to be THE BEST running camp EVER!!!! And Liza, we just have to schedule monthly talks so that we can keep up with each other!!


    • Liza
      Posted on

      Liza Liza

      Reply Author

      Deal.