So, Why Run?

This is an unabashedly obvious sequel to my previous post on running, in which I made it sound like running is directly responsible for making a hateful, competitive person. That's not really what I meant, but I feel like maybe it's worth explaining briefly why I bother doing something that is obviously so fucking torturous.

Well, all of this first popped into my head while I was on my run earlier, because as I finished my first 3.2 mile lap and started up the hill at the beginning of my second, I was quite literally thinking "Why in the fuck am I doing this to myself?" In part, I think that question answers itself: I like running precisely because it creates a thinking space for me, a place and time within which I cannot do anything else but face my own thoughts, confront my own fears, grudgingly celebrate my own victories, etc., etc. It's like being on a road trip by myself, but even better because I come out in the end in much better shape instead of much worse shape. And this is good in turn because I've found over the last few years that being in shape just makes me a happier person.

This is hard to talk about. It's hard to talk about putting a lot of effort and interest into exercising and eating right without:
a) People assuming that you inherently judge them for not doing the same.

b) People assuming that your motivation for exercising is to Do Impressive Things and/or your motivation for eating right is to Not Be A Fat (Bad) Person.

c) People getting angry because they are also put a lot of effort into exercising and eating right, but they do it differently and, apparently, better.

Physical fitness and/or healthy eating (or lack thereof) suddenly seem to be foundational to a lot of people's conceptions of themselves. So they're hard things to talk about without bumping up against someone else's sense of self, and thus indirectly insulting them. I don't really identify as a Runner or a Healthy Eater, so this is a little incomprehensible to me. But I do try to stay in good, healthy shape because I don't really think there's much of a distinction between body and mind (and soul, if you're into that). If one's happier, the other will be happier. I wouldn't sleep four hours a night for an entire week and expect to be completely emotionally and mentally stable at the end. Why would I eat Cheetos for dinner and watch TV four hours a day and expect to be emotionally and mentally stable at the end?

I started running originally because Lindsey, who had been a triathlete before I met her, was trying to lose weight and wanted to get back into running. I was actually really lukewarm about it at first, as I thought it was much more fun to sit on my ass all day and not expend yet more energy on exercise in addition to all the energy I expended on work, socializing, etc. Then I started mountain climbing with my friend John and I realized that that was something I wanted to be able to not only do, but do with relative ease so I could focus more on how fucking beautiful everything around me was while I was climbing instead of on how badly my back, lungs, legs, and shoulders hurt. It was hard to regularly access good climbing territory in the flatlands of the Palouse, so I started running instead, figuring that at the very least I'd get a cardiovascular boost from it. Later that year, Lindsey decided she wanted to run a half marathon, and I agreed to try to run it with her. The rest is (unimportant, personal) history.

Suffice to say, the harder I worked at running, the better I got at it, and the better I felt as a result. I've rarely felt better in life than I did last summer essentially cruising through a half marathon, paying attention to the passing sights, having conversations with other runners, and just enjoying the fact that I had trained myself up to such a point of physical ability that I could more or less toss off a 13 mile run on a weekend.

Certainly, this is fun in part because it makes me feel like a badass, and who doesn't like feeling like a badass. But it's always been less about Getting Awesome and more about Getting To Have Awesome Experiences. No matter what speed I train up to, there are always going to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of runners who are better than me. I personally know at least five people, off the top of my head, who will be better runners than me for the rest of our respective lives, by an unbelievably long shot. When I think about how good they are at running, it's like comparing a dog and a shark in an ocean-swimming competition.*

Competition doesn't interest me. I get down on myself sometimes when it comes to running because it's so quantitative, and there's a tendency to compare Current Me to Old, Better Me from time to time, but the totality of life as something that I go through with a much healthier, responsive, resilient, and more comfortable body as a result of running is absolutely qualitative. I can't look at an experience like climbing the Oregon Matterhorn solo or hiking 30 miles in two days through Hell's Canyon or even just walking up my office at sunrise for work and think "Well, that was worth 10 five-mile jogs!" It just doesn't work that way. Ultimately, when I'm out there running, I'm not thinking about how fast I'm going to finish, or how exciting it's going to be to tell everyone on Facebook how fast I ran. Because, for me at least, that's not what it's about. Instead, I'm thinking about how everything is going to be a little more enjoyable and easier later (even more running!) because I'm doing something difficult now. And, as long as that Something Difficult isn't a run further than, say, 15 or so miles, I'm absolutely okay with that.

* Not my best metaphor.

Running Is A Cruel Mistress

For one, she does not take well to be ignored. I'm sitting here typing a few hours after my first six mile run in...oh, probably two or three months, and it feels like my entire skeletal structure has been replaced with firecrackers. Tomorrow it won't hurt at all though, and the next time I do a long run (within the week), it'll be a little easier, and the next time it'll be easier still, and so on. This is how you get better at most things, but with running it's easier to quantify that improvement than with, say, writing journal articles or giving presentations: you run farther than you did before, or you run faster than you did before (or both), and that means you're doing better.

The problem with this easy quantifiability is that it works on the impractical assumption that you're always going to keep running, and thus always going to keep getting better, even if progress is slow. For example, I'll often run the same route five times in a row, and sometimes, say, the third run will be slower than the first run. But overall, there's a tendency toward improvement. But if I do three of those runs, and then Other Life gets in the way for a few weeks, and then I come back, I'm lucky if I can even finish that run the fourth time, let alone at the same speed I'd worked up to before.

My run today was 6.5 miles, and I was having a bit of trouble, physically and mentally, by the time I finished. Maybe for some of you reading, that sounds like an amazing achievement. Objectively, I suppose it is. But this past summer I was running 13 miles with fair regularity, at a faster pace throughout that I turned in today on my 6.5 mile run. So to me it feels like stepping backward.

I guess this is what bugs me about running, then: that precisely because it's so easy to quantify your ability level and your progress, it's equally easy to quantify your slips backward. It's maybe a silly thing to worry about: I haven't ran much for the last few months because we moved across the country, settled in to a new city, started new jobs, bought a dog...oh, and I've been hiking about 20-30 miles a week and summiting a peak or two or three every weekend for the last two months. So it's not necessarily that I've gotten lazy (and who cares if I had, anyway?), but more just that I'm not running.

However, knowing that I'm objectively worse at it than I once was, and that the only way to get better is to do the same training I've already done a few times is always a little disheartening. There are a lot of other things in life I can pick back up after a month or so off and at least delude myself into thinking I haven't gotten any worse at them. Like, for example, guitar. I'm certainly better at guitar if I play for an hour every day for a month, but if I play once a week, I can still play one of 30 or so songs well at the drop of hat, and I'm okay with that level of proficiency. Running is always taunting me with the knowledge that I used to be faster, or able to run further. It's hard to be happy about creaking through 6.5 miles when you know you've done an easy 13 miles, and not that long ago. And that's an attitude that I don't naturally have about most things. I'm not obsessive about improvement, perfection, etc. in most aspects of my life, but it feels sometimes like that's the only type of relationship running will allow me to have with it. Nonetheless, I'll be out there doing my 2.6 mile sprint tomorrow, snowy skies willing.

Schedule For a Perfect Day

515am - Wake up at Lindsey's house in Post Falls.

545am - Have massive breakfast of frozen waffles at said house with friends and Lindsey's family.

630am - Leave the house and drive to Coeur D'Alene through spring morning mist.

700am - Get changed, line up at the starting line, get lost and not have time to hand off car keys and heavy jacket.

730am - Start Coeur D'Alene half-marathon, running side-by-side with Lindsey.

732am - Find Lindsey's brother's wife while running with a jacket with car keys in the zip pocket. Hand off my jacket and keys.

~740am - Meet up with and run briefly with Jadd, Lindsey's brother, then get left behind as he speeds up to run on his own.

~750am - Meet up with my friend Jill's mom, Shelley, who's flown in from Iowa to run the race, and start running with her.

~800am - On approximately mile three of the race, swallow a Shot Block whole and almost die of asphyxiation. Force self to hack it up, regain ability to breathe, keep running.

~815am - Lose feeling in right foot, stop to retie it.

~830am - Regain full feeling in foot.

~915am - Part ways with Shelley to run faster.

~955am - Meet up with Daniel and Jadd, who finished the race ahead of us, and run the last quarter-mile or so with both of them.

~1000am - Finish the race with a last long sprint to the finish line and clock in with pretty much the same time we finished with last year at the Leavenworth half-marathon.

1030am - Meet up with Dale alongside the track and run in with him as he finished his fourth full marathon.

1100am - Drive back to Post Falls to play with puppies and recuperate.

100pm - Eat a huge lunch in the backyard of Lindsey's parents' house, consisting of various summery-grilled foods and potato salad and cole slaw.

130pm - Take a nap on the ground.

200pm - Socialize with lots of great people that I don't get to see often enough.

300pm - Leave to drive back home to Pullman in gorgeous (but cool) weather with Lindsey and Daniel.

500pm - Get back home, unpack.

600pm - Drive to theater with Lindsey, buy tickets to Iron Man 3 and an enormous Coke Icee.

630pm - Watch Tony Stark blow the shit out of bad guys for a few hours.

900pm - Drive to Emerald Garden with Lindsey and order huge amounts of cheap Chinese food. Bring home leftovers.

1030pm - Go to bed and commence sleeping forever.

The end.

that's when i knew if i stopped running, i would die [/melodrama]

and that's not some emo-blog metaphor-y statement this time, oh no. it's literally how i felt an hour ago running a five mile loop from my office out along terre view and back.

i do this route pretty often, but i haven't done it recently because, well, it's winter and it gets windy out there, and i can't run in pants because it feels weird. running shorts + winter = bad. BUT...i haven't run much lately because i was home for break for three weeks and i've been slammed with work (and the accompanying stress) since i've been back. so today i came in to work a bit early so i could be sure to finish in time to run before i went home for dinner. i finished at 8pm. unfortunately at that point the animal-brain part of me that thinks mountain climbing in a snowstorm is "fun" took over and i decided i was not only going to run in shorts in weather that "feels like" 15 degrees, i was going to run FIVE FUCKING MILES.

fortunately, i'm in good enough shape at the moment that the physical exertion of running those miles was something i could pretty easily handle. however, exposing a lot of bare skin and a torso that had to power a really busy circulatory system to 15 degree temperatures for the forty-five minutes it took to run that far was a bit tricky.

ultimately, it was more of a mental challenge than a physical one (i.e. it's hard to keep up your morale when you're trying to run and shiver at the same time), and there were a few moments when i thought about turning around...but of course that was at the halfway point, which made things sort of hopeless either way, so i kept going.

note: i'm pretty well trained in winter survival, so i'm smart enough to not actually freeze to death, in case you were wondering that at this point.

on the home stretch, when i reentered the main part of campus by the football stadium, i passed a few large groups of students that were actually rooting for me, which was hilarious, considering the usual (and frequent) comments i get from students about being a "faggot" or a "faerie" or a "homo" (from men and women alike, oddly enough) when i'm running. the first group i passed (a group of girls) actually just shrieked in terror, one yelling "what's wrong with you?!" another yelling "how are you running?! it's so cold!" and another just yelling "fuuuuuuuck!" the next group was mixed-gender, and one of the girls yelled "DO IT!" at me in such a super-intense, drill-sergeant sort of way that i had no choice but to high-five her as i ran by, yelling "YEEEEAH!" in response.

it was a good time. oh, and i finished in 45:55, which is a super fast time for me, even when it's not bloody freezing.