At the stArting Line

TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY. APRIL 13, 2014. I’ve had quite a lot of them already. I am eighty-six years old and I am standing at the starting line of the first Istrian . For my birthday, I will treat myself to a 21- kilometer run, a . I can hardly believe I am so old. How fast the years have passed and how much everything has changed during that time. I was born in 1928 in , then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Cro- ats, and Slovenes. King Alexander Karađorđević was on the throne. The first radio station in Slovenia began broadcasting as the Radio . Back then, a voice travelling through the air seemed like an unbelievable miracle, but since then, an amazing number of things have changed. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was transformed into the Social- ist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the devastation of World War II. And in the smaller war in the 1990s, Yugoslavia itself disintegrated and a new independent Slovenia was born from the ashes. Capitalism replaced socialism, the umbrella of the European Union replaced that of Yugosla- via. And as for technology—well, now that there are computers and the Internet, Radio Slovenia seems like a quaint relic from a very distant past. Change is the one thing that has been a constant in my life. When I run, the world and time slow down and stand still, or at least that’s the way it seems to me. And I like that. I am at an age when I have no interest in rushing. There are many places in the world that provide a concentration of the spirit. A person can lock the door, turn off the light, switch off all communication. My home is that kind of quiet place, but I feel it isn’t yet time to close myself up in it. I don’t want to live in a grave. When I run I feel peaceful, and that is especially true today. I need peace because I want to return to the past. I want to meet once again the people whom I met on the path of my life, greet them, talk to them, and say good- bye to them, perhaps forever or perhaps only until the next time. x AT THe STARTIng LIne

Somehow I sense that I wouldn’t still be here today if it weren’t for the running, and so I know it is right that I choose my birthday as the day to say goodbye to running. It is time to pay off my debt. I am eighty-six years old. Twenty-one kilometers sounds young. But for now, I will have to unite those two words. I have been going on runs when my thoughts glimmered on and off, pushing me forward. Those are the kinds of thoughts I need today because I am afraid. Afraid that I won’t be able to finish, afraid that, soon, I will not just have to stop running one day, but right in the middle of this race.

I have loved running for as a long as I can remember, but I have only run longer organized races for the last thirty years. Before that, women didn’t participate in such events. I remember how it was when we ran to Kumrovec, a village in the northern part of Croatia. This is a really small village, but was very popular in the former Yugoslavia. It is famous as the birthplace of Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), the President of Yugo- slavia. The birth house of Tito, built in 1860 as the first brickwork house in the village, features the Memorial Museum of Marshal Tito. Schoolchil- dren from all over Yugoslavia come to honor the Marshal. Actually, the whole village is converted into a museum, with all the houses displaying permanent exhibitions of artifacts related to the life and work of peasants in the 19th/20th century, into which Tito was born. It is not quite a coincidence, then, that it was here that I encountered the injustice: only men were expected to enter the fifteen-kilometer race; for women it was considered too long. That was in 1980, not so long ago. One of my girlfriends, Natalija, wore a disguise so she could run with men. The rest of us settled for the shorter race. But my feelings of injustice were actually coming to term. Those were the years when things were changing. The following year when in Slovenia they opened the marathon to women, I immediately signed up. I ran my first marathon in Kranj, a town not far from my home in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Up to that moment, I had almost believed the prevailing stereotypes about women and had no plan to become a marathon runner. I was used to winning in my usual com- petitive field on shorter runs, and so I cautiously signed up for the half marathon. My friend Betka, who hasn’t run for a long time now, scolded AT THe STARTIng LIne xi me, saying that the half marathon was too short, that I should run the full marathon with her. “The full marathon?” I couldn’t believe my ears. I was fifty-four years old. I wanted to know how I would perform on a test that everyone said exceeded the powers and capabilities of women. I did very well, as it turned out, perhaps due to—more than anything else—my determined temperament. I finished the race in three hours and thirty-two minutes. That was the Three Hearts Marathon, in Radenci, the natural spa where the Three Hearts brand name is located. It comes from a source of mineral water discovered already in 1833 by Karol Henn, at the time still a student of medicine. According to a local legend, strange sounds and bubbling coming from the ground were believed to be the sounds of witches cook- ing soup deep underground. While passing by the mineral water spring in a carriage on the way to nearby Ljutomer, Henn overheard the sounds of the bubbling water. He took some samples of water for analysis and returned to Radenci many years later when he had become a reputable doctor and expert in the therapeutic use of natural spring waters. He bought the property together with the mineral spring, and in 1869 the first mineral water, named Radeiner Sauerbrunn, was bottled from the spring. The same year he bottled the first Radenska Three Hearts mineral water, which was later supplied to the emperor’s court in Vienna and to the pope’s palace in Rome. The mineral water became known for its healing effects, and in 1882 the first guests were welcomed to the health resort and the town later developed into a thermal spa health resort. So it was here in this place of the healing mineral water that I ran my second marathon. And after that, almost all the they organized in Slovenia up to now. The first marathons in Slovenia were held in Kranj, Bovec (in the beautiful Soca valley), and Radenci in the same year, in 1981. But after a couple of years, the organizers of the marathons in Bovec and Kranj had to give up—not enough runners came. Radenci, probably because of the healing water, continued to attract enough runners, and more and more participated from year to year, and also the number of women grew. Many more races followed. In my life, I have run about ten full mara- thons and so many half marathons I cannot count them. I have run twenty half marathons in Radenci alone and have also run a full marathon there. xii AT THe STARTIng LIne

I have run both distances all over Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia: in Kranj, Ljubljana, Bovec, Gorica, Kumrovec, Belgrade, Umag, Bled. I have run in Trieste and Slovakia, even in America. I used to be very fast. People often asked me how I regarded all the young men and women I passed along the way, and I answered that I didn’t. I just ran with all the strength in my legs and hoped that I would be the fastest. From time to time, I received an invitation from a paying sponsor but I always declined. I ran for pleasure, the love of life, and plain old curi- osity. I was interested in how I felt when I was running, the rhythm of running, how all those individual steps bring inner peace. I liked to feel the pleasant tiredness after a race, and I also liked the desire for the next race glimmering in the fading fatigue of the previous one. Such sensations were more precious to me than results and rankings. I never wanted to be obligated to anyone. I feared that the sponsors’ expectations would rob me of those precious pleasures, and I still look at it that way today. To be a good person is a lifelong duty, but a duty one has to oneself. To be a good runner should not be for sale. And thus I come to each new race unburdened, with the delight of a child. Only in this way, do we feel pure happiness in our achievements. I have run all of the Ljubljana marathons from the first one in 1996 to the last one in 2013. Regretfully, I ran only half-marathons, because the first time the race was held, I was already sixty-eight years old. Altogether there were fewer than seven hundred people competing at the first Ljubljana Marathon, of which approximately one hundred and twenty were women. Of the total, only eight ran the longer race, fifty ran the half-marathon, and sixty the ten-kilometer race. The night before that race, the organizers held a wonderful welcoming event at the . In the main hall we were treated to a rich variety of dishes, all washed down with champagne. The event was never repeated, which is not surprising, since each year the number of partici- pants expanded and the hall would have been too small for all of us. Still, it is a pity that the celebratory evening could not have grown with our numbers. We felt so magnificent that first night, as if our love of running had some added meaning that was finally understood by our country, or at least by the city of Ljubljana. Now that the Ljubljana Marathon has become an international event, it is even more meaningful because it has become AT THe STARTIng LIne xiii the people’s event, and the people are certainly too numerous to fit into the main castle hall. The morning after the celebration, I ran the half-marathon in two hours and two minutes, despite all the champagne. Not so many years have passed since then, but what a change there is! Back then to be a runner was entirely different, much more exotic. It was almost as if people were ashamed of doing something for the sheer joy of doing it, not caring about the result or having a good time. Recreational running was regarded as bizarre. Only the really fast entered races. There were few non-competitive entrants and no slower recreational runners at all. If such people dared to run, they did it secretly, on some lonely forest trail. These pioneers of recreational running dressed in ordinary clothes as if they were going out on a Sunday stroll. In other countries, more leisurely and less fit recreational runners had been participating in marathons for many years before they did here in Slovenia. I ran my last full marathon in New York in 1995. It wasn’t easy to get in. The organizers even demanded an essay in which participants described their running experience. They also asked for an estimation of my time. I wrote that I would complete the race in approximately four and a half hours. I was sixty-seven years old and I succeeded in running the race in exactly four hours and thirty-two minutes. Well, that is the past now. Today, I am celebrating my birthday and I find myself once again on the starting line, at the beginning of a course I have never run, because it is the first time it has been organized. In a way, I am a midwife at the birth of this race, as are all the other runners, without whom it would not exist. This is my first Istrian Marathon—and my last marathon ever. This thought, the one I have been pushing away for several weeks now, forces its way into my mind. It seems I must get used to the idea. After all, you have to stop sooner or later. At one point, somewhere, you must arrive at the final finishing line. But first you have to start, and then there is the long, long run, and only in the end do you arrive at the destination and achieve your goal. In between, there is enough time to wonder what the goal is at all. Such ques- tions are much worse in a competition than the runners who are trying to overtake you. It is so hard these days to even define goals: what should I expect next, what will my goals be tomorrow. And now that my husband Stane passed xiv AT THe STARTIng LIne away, I have no one to consult with about it. But I am here now. I had signed up to run this race before. Stane knew about it, he knew I was going to run today, so I am going to, and I will try to be grateful for every step. I do not know some of the sections of the course that awaits me today and I’m looking forward to them especially. It is nice to run along a known course but the discovery of new ones is also something precious. There is something I particularly like at the start of this one: the smell of the sea. Stane, too, loved that smell. I remember how we were always happy when we approached that vast expanse of blue. It took us some time for the senses to grow accustomed to it and for the excitement to fade. Cer- tainly, he would have been here with me today, watching me get ready for the race, seeing me from afar, but feeling me close—if he had not died twenty days ago. Yes, my Stane is gone, without a real goodbye. We were just sitting on the sofa at home talking. We had been sitting like that countless times before, discussing the day, our life together. But on this occasion, he looked at me in a way that I didn’t recognize in him, a look that seemed to see something beyond me, something that was even less visible than the scent of the sea if that was possible. At that moment, he saw more than I did. He hadn’t been feeling well for some days, but he wouldn’t let me call the doctor. He was a wise man. He didn’t want them to take him away. He wanted to stay with me at home, in the peace he was accustomed to. He wanted to accept what life had in store for him, and he remained loyal to me to the very end. He knew how to accept illness, age, and finally death, with peace and dignity. That morning our youngest daughter, Tanja and her husband Tone had come for a visit. When I told her that her father didn’t feel well, she imme- diately went to him, spoke reassuring words and stroked his forehead. “That’s what I like,” he told her. He didn’t resist death, remaining serene until the end. Later I noticed that he had arranged his things, his papers were all in order, the most important at the top, the savings all transferred into my bank account. The shelves of our pantry were freshly stocked with the food that I liked best. I am old enough to easily go with him. I could. I would have wanted to go that afternoon so we wouldn’t be apart for so long. We had been together for sixty-six years. His passing away weakened my spirit so badly that I felt AT THe STARTIng LIne xv dangerously close to death myself. I just wanted to be with him again, to spend our days as we were used to, in pleasant accord, peacefully chatting as we went about our errands, accepting everything that happened but still curious about what was there ahead of us. After everything I experienced during the past weeks, I can hardly believe that I am standing here at the starting line. When I think that Stane is no longer around, my heart hurts so badly that it is hard for me to even stand up, let alone run. My heart is broken, not to mention my lifelong cheering section has gone and left me all by myself. It is so indescribably sad that I could just sit down on the pavement and die. But I have to run today. Running is what will rescue me. Running is what remained from before, from the time when Stane was still alive. “Run, Helena, run,” I say to myself. “Even if you feel like you can’t, take a few steps, and you’ll find the way. Stane will be waiting for you when you fi n i s h .” Stane, my faithful cheering section. He accompanied me to the starting line and waited for me at the finishing line. He always cooked breakfast or lunch for me on the day of a race. “I won’t let you run if you don’t eat up everything,” he would admonish me. He always thought I was too thin. He loved to take care of me, and to take care of our house and the garden around it. If he were healthy, he could have run with me. But he wasn’t—he had suffered from multiple sclerosis since he was forty-two, most of his adult life—but he had made peace with it. So, instead, he was my faithful sup- porter, happy with everything that made me happy. He was as proud of me as I was of him. He supported me passionately, sincerely enjoying my victories, and I was so grateful to him for that. We were married for sixty years, and, through all that time, he under- stood that I wanted, that I needed to run, that it was a part of my nature, and that without it, I would be different. I wouldn’t be me. “Stane, where did you go to? Where are you?” That was the question I kept asking myself over and over again, the question that kept tormenting me even when I was surrounded by other people. “Why did you leave me alone? Didn’t we agree that we would be together until the very end?” xvi AT THe STARTIng LIne

Things had been so good between us. I think that when he left I had only two choices: immediately go after him or use the steps I had used my whole life as a way of connecting each new day. Besides, when I ran, I strongly felt that he could see me even if he was far away. I chose the second option and a few days after his death, I went out to train. Never before had I felt so weak. But that first terrible run was my salvation. And so were all the following ones. All of them were useless as preparation for this competition, but they were all I had. And that’s why I’m here today. I have good shoes and gear. Every couple of kilometers I will get a bit to eat, which will give me additional strength. There are a lot of us waiting to start. A lot plus one more: Stane, who is with me and in me. I feel my legs raring to go. They move in place, making little steps of static impa- tience. The burden of life is too great. Only in freedom, in movement, are we connected to nature, and in nature things change constantly. The starting line. Stane, we are off!