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| How it looks is exactly how I felt - finishing a 10k race in March 2013 |
As I stumbled down the two flights of stairs in the Cape May bed and breakfast inn where my wife and I decided to get away for a relaxing weekend, I was thinking to myself, this is technically a vacation, my wife's up there sleeping like any sane person would be sleeping at 7 am on a Saturday morning on vacation, and I could be sleeping, too, for at least another hour and a half or so. What the hell am I doing?
We'd been to Cape May, damn, I'd have to say this was the fifth time we'd spent a weekend in this town. Because I treat this town as a place to unwind and relax, and because I generally do not associate distance running with unwinding or relaxing, I'd actually never run a single step within Cape May city limits before*. But this morning, this unseasonably frigid April morning with temperatures barely above freezing and a complimentary 25 mph swirling wind, just to make things extra interesting, I was going to run the streets of Cape May.
(*NOTE: I'm fairly certain this is true, as I have meticulously kept statistics on every run I've taken since January 2008 in an Excel spreadsheet, but it is possible that I did run Cape May on a visit prior to 2008. I encourage every runner to keep notes about each run - I keep date, distance, time, pace (calculated by Excel), location, and notes. My "notes" generally include brief details about how I felt, whether I ran alone or with a friend, the weather that day, and any special achievements or items worth jotting down.)
The problem with this particular run was, it was God-awful terrible. Specifically it was terrible in the worst possible way - I am generally a healthy and strong runner, but my one long-term weakness is cold and windy weather when I don't have my ski gloves. I have poor circulation in my hands, and I also react awfully to frostbitten hands in a total body, almost autoimmune sense. Now, every runner has to give up on a run (I call it "bonking", a phrase I learned from my father) once in a while, but 2013 had - to this point - been a banner year so far in the not-bonking category. I had run dozens of times up to that point, under different conditions and for different distances, without a single bonk.
But 3.3 miles into a scheduled six-miler, I had to pack it in and walk back to the bed and breakfast, muttering curses under my breath, shamed by the road. When I returned to the relative comfort of our heated room, it still took me another ten minutes for the frostbite to subside enough for me to relax and actually take a shower and get along with my day.
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Today's run was the complete opposite experience, by the way - seven miles at a comfortable 8:34 pace (how many of you knew that was 7.0 miles per hour?) at a local park. Though it was still breezy outside, the weather had warmed to sixty degrees and as a result I was able to run in a t-shirt and shorts. The park was buzzing with people, as today was the first truly spring-like weekend day of the year, and this actually inspired me to run faster. As much as I hated yesterday's attempt at running, today was an example of why I run.
The health benefits of a moderate amount of running (let's call it 15-25 miles per week, though everyone is different) are pretty much indisputable. A man my age and my size burns 150 calories per mile; running twenty miles in a week burns 3,000 calories, so it's pretty difficult for me to gain weight when I'm able to run twenty miles per week on average.
Mentally, the benefits are just as clear. Twenty miles is about three hours per week spent running, at my current pace. Whether it's on a treadmill or outdoors, that is a great deal of time for organizing one's thoughts and working through one's troubles. Outdoor running is also forced sun exposure, which - in addition to a relatively strong early season farmer's tan - has mental health benefits as well. People get SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) for a reason, and I'm fairly prone to feeling down in the winter time as well. When winter finally starts transitioning into spring each year, I can't wait to get outside and run.
These are benefits for anyone, and they are relative to each person's previous health condition. A sedentary person could complete a "Couch to 5k" running program and achieve notable health benefits, just because of where they were before. I'm a repeat half marathoner (my seventh half marathon will take place later this month) so it's a bit more challenging for me to push the health envelope - I would either have to run longer, which I do not want to do, or run faster, which I am begrudgingly attempting to do.
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I run to escape my problems, and I intend to be completely transparent about that.
I run because if I didn't run, I would eat the same way I currently eat, and consume the occasional few beers the same way I currently drink the occasional few beers - but I would not feel, act, or look the same way I do right now, because I run.
I run to compete against myself, because I'm years out of school now and I'm still addicted to competition. Until you graduate college (or, I suppose, law school if you're a lawyer or med school if you're a physician), you're constantly competing intellectually against your peers. If you're a talented student, you learn to love the competition (because you're used to winning, for the most part). But in corporate America, I have found that score keeping is vague, competitions are few and far between, and you don't know who wins and who loses until everyone retires. So I run to keep that spirit of healthy competition alive.
I run to be social, which is weird because for many people running is a solitary endeavor, and it is weird because I'm not a very small-talky, chatty person in my everyday life. Put me in a race environment, though, and I become best friends with people I've never met before (I am also like this at bars and at playoff baseball games; random strangers bear hugged me after Mark Teixiera hit a walk-off home run in a 2009 playoff game against the Twins - I guess I am just very huggable).
I run to live longer, because I'm convinced that the human heart wants to be pushed (within boundaries, as ultra marathoners are hurting themselves without a doubt) and the human heart does not want to beat a hundred times per minute at rest. People disagree with me on this, and that's fine - I concede that runners have been known to drop dead from time to time - but in a very macro sense, an average, moderate runner should see more years on this planet (and more of those years should be healthy years) than someone who does not run at all.
Finally, I run to experience running. Running hurts, and frankly running sucks sometimes. But you learn a great deal about yourself through running distances, breaking down your own mental barriers, running with people, and becoming enraptured in the process of simply putting one foot in front of the other, quickly, for an extended period of time.
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I do not, on the other hand, run for the following reasons:
- To compete against others;
- To be "good" at running;
- To push myself further and further every single time;
- To crawl through mud, climb fences, be cut by razor wire, etc.
I can't push myself further and further every time because then I'd burn out and stop running altogether. For someone who races fairly regularly, I am exceedingly prone to running burnout. I have my share of problems with running journalism (e.g., Runner's World), one of which is the assumption that the readership runs because they love and/or are addicted to running. I face palm every time I read these articles about post-race recovery plans that include things like "We know the first thing you want to do the next day after a half marathon or marathon is get back on the pavement. Fight that urge." Um, I'm sorry, what? Please tell me this is sarcasm and I am just not getting the joke. After racing 13.1 miles and leaving every ounce of energy I had on those 13.1 miles of pavement, I barely want to drive down a road for the next week or two after the race, let alone run on pavement. I get pavement PTSD. I can't even listen to shitty 90's grunge rock, that's how scared I get of Pavement.
And finally, there is this totally okay for other people, but not for me, running subculture of these "tough guy" runs. I was reading an article about how these "tough guy" Spartan runs attract type-A, masochistic macho stock trader types - the kind who pump iron because they just want to be awesome, brah. Apparently these guys crawl through sewer pipes and have their nipples plugged into electrodes just to finish these "races", which are loosely inspired by Marine Corps boot camp hell weeks. So to each their own, I suppose. You guys should have fun at your Goldman Sachs sausage festivals, and I'll just stay the course and enjoy running regular races, which I guess will now consist of only regular guys and all of the women. Sucks to be a regular guy, I guess.
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I will know that I love running when I am able to run consistently for a year without any sort of break. As of the present time, I have never been able to pull this off. I typically train hard through the winter and early spring for a half marathon; then break for a while and hardly run at all for most of the summer (just three miles here or there). Then I pick it up again in the late summer and through the fall for a second half marathon; then I break for the holidays. For all I know, this strategy (if you can call it that) has kept me from becoming seriously injured while running. But still, I would appreciate a year's worth of consistency for consistency's sake - just so I know I could do it.
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