Can-Do

My mother hit 45 and started coming home at all hours of the morning sporting t-shirts with the sleeves ripped off and old bandanas stained with sweat. No, she didn’t join a motorcycle gang — that would’ve been too tame. Instead, she was ducking out of the house at five in the morning to go to Rambo Boot Camp, a training program for adventure races. The names of adventure races — Spartan, Tough Mudder, Warrior Dash — evoke an action movie in which Matt Damon, blood-streaked and muddy, probably perpetually missing his shirt, runs around getting the shit beat out of him in intervals that leave his ripped chest splattered with increasing amounts of blood and mud. And the names are not misleading. Racers scale walls on rope webs, haul tires, logs, and other objects of a bothersome weight and size. They jump, crawl, and run — and then they do all these things again, only this time through a wall of fire. And the fun doesn’t end there. Finish the Warrior Dash, for example, and you are rewarded a medal that doubles as a “wall-mounted bottle opener,” a victory beer, and a horned and furry “Warrior helmet.” You feel like Theseus; you look like the Minotaur.

Rambo Boot Camp is run by a woman named Anne Jones, who looks exactly like the kind of person who could train a Greek hero. Her white hair is cut close to her head; her body is a thick brick of muscle. She is not your slim young Zumba trainer with a bobbing ponytail, tanned and toned, a single line of sweat sneaking down her forehead as she yells for you to do “just 10 more!” Anne is tanned and toned, but if your Zumba trainer is a show horse, Anne is an ox. On her Facebook is a picture of her hauling a ten foot log over her shoulder. White text that overlays the picture reads, “You can sleep when you’re dead.” Anne grins broadly at the camera, like a child caught playing proudly in the mud. Wrinkles have worn lines in her face where she has smiled a thousand times before.

In addition to leading Rambo, Anne coaches tennis, and coaches and manages TriAdventure, a triathlon training group. Fortunately for my mom, who has been shamed out of more than one Zumba class, you don’t need to be coordinated to take orders from Anne. You don’t need to look good in yoga pants or have a gym membership. No one is too old, young, injured, or out of shape. There are seven-year-old triathletes and grey-haired adventure racers with hip problems. The best trait Anne can find in an athlete is “…just having that desire.” If someone is willing to work for their goal, she is there to help — no matter what their starting point. When Mom started training with her, she was intimidated by the size of the workouts. The numbers attached to their assigned exercises — burpees or push-ups or stair repeats or the like — seemed unrealistic. They seemed impossible. My mom would tell Anne she couldn’t do 50 pushups. She couldn’t do 100 burpees.

“Yes you can,” Anne would reply.

Mom would eye a fellow Rambo-er unhappily as his rippling muscles easily breezed through 28, 29, 30… she protested. She could not.

“Take breaks,” Anne would tell her. So Mom would slowly, painfully, make her way through a set while others sped ahead. When she came home red-faced and sweaty the morning after a workout, she would sometimes report that she had taken fewer breaks. That she felt stronger. That she never thought she could do 50 of whatever she had done that day. Mom spoke almost reverently of Anne’s calm, stubborn belief in her. Anne didn’t expect her to pound out pushups with the same speed as the guy next to her. But she didn’t accept “I can’t” lightly. And each day, Mom started to come home with more and more “I cans”. I can do 25 push-ups. I can do a 25 burpees. I can run up and down the steps in Virginia Tech’s football stadium without stopping.

Anne’s can-do attitude is not loud or overbearing — but it is powerful enough to be contagious. Can-do is not so much a belief for Anne as it is a lifestyle, and for Anne, “do” is an active verb. She coaches Rambo every morning from 5:30 to 7 a.m., and by 7:30 a.m. she’s usually coaching tennis. When she’s not coaching, she’s on the court herself, smacking balls back and forth, surrendering herself to the heat ofcompetition. The activity is something that “helps me as I get older,” says Anne, who is now in her late fifties. “…But mainly it’s just fun for me. I just like beating up on people.” She laughs.

When Anne finishes tennis around noon, she heads home to work on her computer — mostly organizing things for TriAdventure, dealing with race registration and the like. “Which I’d rather not do,” Anne says. “If it were up to me, I’d be doing something with nuts and bolts and screws…I’d give anything to have an excuse to mow the lawn or something. I’d much rather be active than at a desk.” So she finds a little bit more time to move before the day is out. She bikes for an hour and half most days, lifts weights four times a weeks, and kills time in the evenings doing core or yoga, before she finally heads to bed a little before midnight. Anne goes and goes and goes — until she stops. Anne is like a train. When she’s going, she’s a force to be reckoned with. She goes a hundred percent. The woman gets things done. But when stops, she comes to full rest.

“I like sitting,” she said once of her moments of rest. “I don’t think people realize how happy I am just sitting.” Anne’s happy when she’s moving, and she’s happy when she’s not.

This is something you risk missing when listening to the life story of Anne Jones, a woman who has run multiple marathons, triathlons, adventure races, and an Ironman. Anne likes to be comfortable. She goes home to two little houses nestled next to each other: one is her own, and the other is her twin sister’s, Lynne’s. Lynne has the same muscular body, the same short white hair, the same grin, and the same exceptional race history. They’ve done most everything together.

“One is usually at the other’s house if we’re not working,” Anne says. And if Lynne is not around? “Sometimes I just lay in the floor with my dog. That’s a really good break.”

For Anne, home is a place to pull close to those you love, to sit and relax and just be. Her life is movement, yes, but it is also this: the warmth in the kitchen of the place you call home, your sister’s smile and the warmth of your dog’s dark furry shoulder, feeling completely at ease and in love with everyone around you.

“Home is my refuge.” Anne says. “I love being home.”

While the two little houses Anne shares with her sister may be the center of Anne’s home, it is certainly not where the feeling ends. Anne Jones belongs in the town of Blacksburg, Virginia. Her name is tossed around the streets of Blacksburg quite often, and the further you delve into the fitness culture of this mountainous college town, the more frequently you hear it. Within the large and diverse group of runners, swimmers, bikers, and hikers that populate Blacksburg, her name enjoys a kind of instant familiarity that makes her as much a part of the landscape as Virginia Tech football coach Frank Beamer, the Appalachian Mountains, and the Hokiebird.

When Anne first set foot in Blacksburg in 1977, Frank Beamer was still a young assistant football coach working in D.C. with a full head of dark brown hair and a neck thick enough to all but swallow his knobby little suggestion of a chin. The Hokie Bird was not a HokieBird at all, but a “fighting gobbler,” a painfully realistic looking mascot with a four-foot neck and harsh yellow beak. It looked more like the estranged weird uncle of the current version. The mountains, for their part, appear almost exactly as they did 40 years ago. I expect their unaltered presence on the horizon is as much as comfort to Anne now as it was when she arrived at Virginia Tech with her twin sister Lynne, and found rounded indigo peaks framing the campus. It looked like home.

Anne and Lynne grew up in the city of War, which proudly advertises itself at “West Virginia’s Southernmost city.” The city unfolds from a single straight road: first a few squat brick buildings line the street, then the humble houses nuzzle tight up against the rolling foothills, then the mountains themselves rise on either side from the valley War sits in, peppered with poplar and birch and maple. It is here that they filmed most of the movie October Sky, about a little mining town and men with black dust stuck perpetually under their eyebrows, men who wore denim jeans and flannel shirts who say “hill” like “heel”. A hundred years ago, War was called “Miner’s City,” and its hills were peppered with the blackened outlines of folks just like this. The children and grandchildren of these miners populated the porches along War’s road long after the mine quit running, and they populate them still. At last count there were 862 people living in War.

When the twins arrived at Virginia Tech, there were nearly 20 times more people living in Blacksburg than in War. The old “Miner’s City,” was still a city, however, while Blacksburg, still stubbornly clinging to its humble, small rural image, remained a town. To this day, the home of the Hokies refuses to make the switch to a city government. By population, it is the largest town in the state of Virginia, and that’s not counting the nearly 30,000 students that bring highway traffic to a grinding halt every August as they flood onto campus. Perhaps it was this bull-headed pursuit of the small-town atmosphere that made Anne Jones and her sister want to stick around after they graduated. Perhaps it was the way that when she set her feet on Main Street and looked west and let her eyes slide from Burruss Hall to the Appalachians, foreground to background, she saw home. Perhaps it was a combination of the two, the way the people feel the not-so-distant history of cow pastures beneath their feet, the way they fought for that small-town Appalachian outlook even as Chipotle’s sprouted up on Main Street. After all, behind the football and the food, this is one of the chief reasons Virginia Tech students give for loving Blacksburg, and the university within it. Something feels different. It must be that Southern hospitality thing, some of the Northern students joke. Even Snapchat is in on it. “This is home,” reads the filter that overlays photos taken on Virginia Tech campus, in big maroon and orange letters. “I think… once you live in that area you know,” Anne said, struggling to articulate some constant feeling, just below the surface. “There’s no better place to be.”

Anne’s husband is a pastor, and a few years back he was called by the governing body of his church to serve a different congregation, about an hour from Blacksburg. He moved, and Anne stayed in Blacksburg, in her conjoined house with Lynne. She baffled my mother with her nonchalance when she explained it. “I told him I was never going to move,” she had said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Blacksburg has her trails. Blacksburg has her school. Blacksburg has her mountains, her church, and her band of loyal athletes. It has dozens of people you find tromping through the woods or smacking a ball on the tennis courts or biking over rolling blue mountains. Above all, Blacksburg is where Lynne lives. And that makes it, indisputably, home.

You cannot look anywhere in Anne’s life without seeing Lynne. There they are perched side by side, chubby toddler hands clasped eagerly over plaid dresses, loose curls framing toothy grins. There they are running laps around War’s high school track. The horizon looms close. Its usual shade of pensive green gives way to oranges and reds as September bleeds into October, and October to November, and still they run on, each girl’s footfalls an echo of the other’s. There they are on a tennis court, cow pastures rolling off on one side and Virginia Tech just visible in the distance on the other. Crisp white skirts swinging over their toned legs. There they are at the table for the Women’s Varsity Sports Club, just five years after the passage of Title 9. (“We just knew we wanted the same stuff the boys got,” Anne says. It was only later that I found out she and her sister were the first women to receive athletic scholarships to Virginia Tech.) There they are striding across campus, brown hair swinging about their ears. There they are reclined on the couch of their graduate school apartment with their roommate and good friend, a field hockey player named Linda Knight, who described meeting the two of them as a perplexing sort of déjà vu. She seemed to see Anne everywhere: in class, on the way to her dorm, in meeting rooms and Bible studies and in class again. “What I didn’t realize,” Knight exclaims, still delighted by the unintended trickery, “was that there was two of them!”

There most certainly was, and once you realize that fact, you’re not likely to forget it. When Anne talks about her past, she doesn’t use the word “I”. Nine times out of 10, it’s “we”. Anne and Lynne. Where one went, the other would follow — and usually to places average humans don’t dare tread.

When the two women started graduate school, they stayed on at Tech but had no choice but to exit collegiate athletics. Anne became an assistant coach for the tennis team, but that didn’t satisfy the women’s fundamental need to compete, to work their bodies and work them hard. They were athletes, a team of two. They cast about for something new. Anne tells me, “Professional sports weren’t really big for women at the time…So Lynne said, ‘how about marathons?’ and I said ok!” They completed their first marathon that year, in the midst of a Anne’s coaching job and heaps of graduate work. Every 10 or so years, they’d try something new. After marathons, it was triathlons. After that, adventure races. After that?

“Oh, I don’t know,” Anne says, chuckling. “Lynne wants to hike the Appalachian Trail.” These last two words are steeped in incredulous humor, and I’m sure she is rolling her eyes. She’s not as excited about the idea. “Too slow for me,” she says.

Fifteen years after she finished her first marathon she ran in the Boston Marathon, the final feather in the hat of serious marathon runner. In order to enter the race, a woman needs a qualifying time close to three hours, which requires you to run seven minutes a mile, for 26 miles, without passing out, slowing down, or falling on the side of the road and waiting for death to come. Three years after she completed her first triathlon, she was racing in the Hawaii Ironman: a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and 26.2-mile run. To be an official finisher, you must complete the race in under 17 hours. The distances are nearly beyond comprehension. Imagine digging your arms through the water, ducking up for air as waves chop at your cheeks, pumping your legs. You push and the water pushes back, and you feel the fight in your thighs as you mount your bike and start the first of 112 miles. When you start to grow tired, you cannot console yourself: “only 20 more minutes” or even: “just an hour to go”. You just keep going. You dismount your bike after hours of grueling racing, five or more hours of going fast while telling yourself go faster. You take a few shaky steps forward on legs are that are still weak beneath the memory of the endless orbit of bike pedals. Only a marathon left to go. Go faster, you tell yourself, and you break into a trot. When Anne says she doesn’t like to go slow, she is exercising her remarkable gift for the unsaid understatement.

Anne Jones likes to go fast. Really fast.

Does she find herself as remarkable as she sounds in this moment? Is she proud to have conquered pain, or fear, or any of the other looming obstacles, internal and external, that come with such a race? When does the queen of all badasses feel most like a badass?

“I think a lot of the things that I do people might consider brave,” she allows, “but I don’t think they’re really brave. I just do them.”

Only a few things have ever made her nervous during a race. She admits that even though she’s done a few triathlons, she’s never felt she was very good at swimming. Racing in the water made her nervous. Racing in open water, through choppy waves that are just as choppy with goggles as without — that made her nauseous just to think about. “So whenever we did triathlons, Lynne would always swim right there beside me,” Anne remembers. But there was one open water race Anne had to brave alone. One race where Lynne had to stay home. There’s a pause. That, she decides, was probably a time she felt brave.

She is sure to explain that it is not the difficulty of the task that scared her. “Of course my first response is nothing scares me,” she says, “but of course that’s not true.” Even in her humility, Anne needs the world to know she can do it, whatever “it” happens to be. Struggling, pain, the possibility of failure, the fire in your calves after miles and miles — this doesn’t scare her. Rather, it was the idea you pass out for some unknown reason mid-race and disappear seconds later in salty undertow that made her sick to her stomach. “I don’t like not being in control. Not to say I always have to be in charge,” she corrects quickly. “…it’s the idea you can be a healthy person, work out, eat right, and still get cancer. But I have great faith in God, and in the end I thought, if he wants me to drown out here today, I will, and if he doesn’t I won’t.”

Turns out he didn’t, and those that fall into Anne’s orbit suspect he had good reason not to. They are a diverse group, Anne’s many planets: fat and thin, young and old, running everything from their first mile or their first marathon. The one thing they have in common, Anne says, is the desire, the willingness to try to be something more. “Don’t be average,” reads her TriAdventure website, followed by a motivational poem by Anne herself.

““Please don’t be average,” it starts. “You are better than average. Average seeks less, keeps New Year’s Resolutions for about a week, cares little about seeing things through. 92% of people making New Year’s resolutions never keep them. 92%! Not one resolution. Not one.”

“But why not be average?” I ask later.

She lets out a little airy “Ha!” She’s never thought about it before. Not-average is just the way she is.

“If everyone were average, we’d only have average people!” she says finally. Anne Jones is proud she’s not average. She wants to spread this feeling and give it away, to let my mom feel the strength in her legs and see my friend’s face glow with pride after completing her first triathlon. Anne Jones looks like a powerful individual, but the true force of her person is hidden in the strength she gives away.

“I think people need to figure out what it is that gives them that sense of achievement. If you have goals, if you have a passion about something, I think you’re going to be happy,” Anne says. “…It doesn’t have to be active. Maybe you’re a business guy, and you like making the sale, closing the deal. I don’t understand that, but maybe that’s it for some people.” Maybe it’s art, or music. Maybe you are meant to play the piano, and it is could give you immeasurable joy — but only if you sit down and actually play.

“I think everybody has something to do. I think everybody is here for something, that you’re put here for a purpose. You need to try and figure that out.” Anne says. For those in her community who feel compelled to run, or jump, to climb or lift, to scramble or swim, to move — Anne is there to push them toward their purpose. It is easy to look at Anne’s life and see something remarkable, but unattainable. It is easy to put Anne in her own, separate, unreachable, Not-Average box. But there is not an “it” factor that Anne has and others don’t. What makes Anne who she is is the same thing she wants from every person she coaches: that desire. That hunger to improve, to try to be the best you can be, to find what you were meant to do, and then get really good at doing it.

Anne tells me about a novel she read in which the main character lives his entire life as if each year were a chapter in a book. “It really made me think: hey, we’re writing a book with our lives and we might as well enjoy it, and do something meaningful.”