On Running, Part Four

I ran my first half-marathon recently.

It’s been several stop-and-go years in coming. I slowly worked up from less than one mile to the necessary 13.1 miles that comprise this race, and I think for most of that time I was secretly convinced I would suffer a heart attack and die in my first race, gasping out my last breath on a piece of unnamed blacktop teeming with spandex-clad humans.

Getting a chance to finally achieve this goal caused me to reflect on all the advice I received along the way, and how this advice did or didn’t translate into my running experiences. Here are a few of those pithy bits of wisdom, followed by explanations of how well said advice did or did not work for me. In no particular order:

1) Stop and smell the roses. Yes, I tried this. Truly I did. Somewhere around mile 3 in the race there was the cutest clutch of interesting little shops huddled together on a charming old cobblestone street. Intrigued, I began glancing from side to side while I ran, taking mental notes on which of those little shops might be fun to visit in the future.

That is the last thing I remember before smashing right-knee-cap-first on the cobblestone street, sprawled confusedly on all fours as runners leaped their way around me. I hastily jumped up, realized I hadn’t broken or ripped anything urgent, and kept on running.

Around mile 10, however, that same kneecap started cussing like a caught teenager, and by the time I was somewhere around mile 11 1/2, that teenager was taking a metal baseball bat to the rest of my trembling, wishing-it-wasn’t-related body. I stopped twice for 30-45 seconds to massage that knee down, hoping the temporary blood boost might help, but Churchill was right on this matter: appeasement is never an option with this kind of combatant.

So when my husband inquired after the race as to whether or not I’d had a chance to enjoy the scenery as I ran, he got quite an earful about what happens to runners who look side-to-side in order to see the roses, let alone stop to smell them. And in case I should be so foolish as to soon forget this, the purple bruise and right-knee scab served for a long time afterwards as excellent memory jogs.

2) Adrenalin will carry you through. Not so much, actually. I have waited my entire running career for the adrenalin to kick in. For me, it simply doesn’t. Running is slogging hard work for me from start to finish, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon: that “runner’s high” business hasn’t seemed to apply to me at almost any time in the last 5 years. If that changes, I will be the first one to let you know. In the meantime, in lieu of such legally-high moments, the advice in #3 is what carries me through, not highs of any kind (legal or otherwise):

3) Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Yup. Most of running boils down to slogging hard work. Period. I am convinced there are some who were born to run, and then there are the rest of us who were most certainly not born to run but who need to do it for reasons that might be as individual as we are. In other words, just as I wasn’t born to clean the toilet but I still do it, I wasn’t born to run but I still do it. It’s amazing what can get done in life when the following advice is heeded: Put one foot in front of the other. Repeat.

4) You’ll ruin your knees! This can be very good advice, or it can be very poor advice. Only you can know your body well enough to know when you’re pushing it too hard or when you could be pushing considerably more. The tricky bit is that you will have to learn to ultimately trust yourself as to how much of all the unsolicited running-relating medical advice is applicable to you. And the ability to apply such hard-earned wisdom rests largely on experience: experience such as how well you know your own psyche, how much pavement-pounding you’ve done and under what circumstances, how well you read and listen to your own body’s distress signals, etc.

Now I will cut through the tactful statements above and tell you that in my running career thus far, I have been stopped while doing training laps mid-run by various folks wishing to advise me that 1) they ruined their knees and I will, too, and 2) their cardiologist says one’s heart will be just fine with 45 minutes a day of walking, and any form of running is beyond overkill.

This, of course, does not include the numerous folks who very graciously call out “You can do it!” when they see my tongue hanging out and my eyes rolling back into my head (I swear to you that this type of goodwill from perfect strangers is much better than that unfaithful, cheating friend named “adrenalin” when it comes to finishing up that last tortuous bit of a difficult run).

I have also had folks stop me mid-run in order to tell me their life story (not the least of these was the individual who laid hands on me in order to demonstrate self-defense moves she had learned in order to keep her described %$#@ husband at bay, along with all kinds of oversharing about her sex life that I desperately would have paid money NOT to know. However, when one is being held in a vise by an overzealous self-defense advocate, one doesn’t disagree with ANYTHING they might say about their life, sexual or otherwise. Important lesson I absorbed on the spot that day—and it’s been with me ever since.)

5) Don’t run when you’re sick. This is truly wise advice. Of course, I didn’t follow it—I’d had a cold for two weeks prior to running the half, and within 12 hours of running the race, every symptom I’d ever had for the two weeks prior returned with a vengeance, worse than before. The docs told me (when I finally dragged myself in to the clinic over 4 weeks after first getting symptoms, always thinking I was “getting better!” every day and apparently wasn’t) that most likely the half-marathon temporarily trashed my immune system and temporarily depleted my body’s resources. And since my body was still not quite over its first virus bout, the same virus gained its second wind—and how! Imagine a crowd of 6-year-old boys who’ve just been fed bags of candy and given 3 cans of fluorescent spray sticky string each, and now imagine they’ve been told that the adults are going to step out for an hour and the kids can “do whatever they like” until the adults get home again.

Um-hm. The bug went gleefully screaming throughout my body with all three cans of sticky-string held aloft in its sugar-powered rampage, and since my immune system was essentially MIA just like the adults in the equation, that was that.

All told, that virus lasted well over 4 weeks from start to finish. And to go along with that:

6) You will pay the piper. True, that. You will indeed pay the piper. If you run while under the weather, you, too, may end up with a 4-1/2 week virus. If you are in your thirties and you skimp on proper sleep or enough hydration, you will suffer for it. There is no longer such a thing as a freebie at my age—I will be forced to pay for any and all trade-offs I make. For instance, I will pay for the decision to eat half a bag of microwave popcorn and watch a random CSI on Hulu instead of going on an evening run because it “feels too cold.” In fact, I will probably be paying for it as early as the next day, if the scale is any indicator.

Nothing is free in this world, or at least nothing is free in any form of exercise in your thirties and beyond. You will have to work (sometimes ridiculously hard) for every. single. thing. you. get. Carpe diem, and all that.

7) Know some great-quality people. This is seriously some of the best advice ever. There are some quality people in my life, and my husband’s volunteering to put in a journey of 3 hours in ridiculous local traffic in order to pick up my bib for race day while I was at work would most certainly over-qualify him for that category. There were neighborhood locals who always inquired (as they saw my desperately-panting self running what felt like the thousandth lap around the local park and creek) as to when my upcoming race was, calling out “Good luck!” while I panted/hobbled/jogged my way by. There were all kinds of cheerful folks lined up at the race itself, shouting encouragement, and then the super-fast runners actually took the time to shout encouragement at us on their way back to the finish line as our eyes watered from crossing the very long, very high, very steep, and very cold bridge.

7) Don’t focus on what you can’t control—only on what you can. This was an inaugural race for this particular town, and so there were a number of kinks in the process, which is only natural. At one point, however, my husband and I were part of a miles-long, double line of cars attempting to make their way off the interstate unto the exit, and unfortunately there was apparently only one entrance to the parking lot being manned out of the 15 (or so I was told). This meant that we watched the start time for the race come and go on our car clock, still having no idea exactly where it was or whether I’d be able to jump in or not. As race time approached and then passed, the long lines of cars scarcely moving, runners began leaping from their vehicles and running off in the general direction of where they thought the race was going to be.

And this is the point at which I had a choice: I could start worrying that I wasn’t going to be able to participate, and that leaving the house at 5:30 am really had been a bad idea, and that all this work had been a waste, etc., etc., etc.

Or I could choose to simply acknowledge that there would be a late start, and we’d find a way to make it work once we finally managed to get there.

I chose the latter—and that meant I was psychologically ready to go as soon as I got there. Turns out they’d delayed the race’s start due to the problems, and so all was well that ended well.

I also noticed on the run that for the first time ever, I had no idea how much ground I was covering or where I was at in the race at any given time. In all my training runs, I’d always known this information—and it helped me pace myself. On race day, then, I would call out to race volunteers as I passed, asking approximately what mile we were at, and to my surprise, they didn’t know. Due to this factor, I was almost completely unable to pace myself internally, as I simply had no idea where I was at for much of the time. But since I couldn’t control this factor, I just kept putting one foot in front of the other (#3) and doing the best I could.

We only found out late that night after the race that the man in charge of putting in the mile markers along the way had literally broken his foot that very (early) morning, making him unable to get those mile markers put in for the race. We all felt sorry for him, and to me it was another reminder that stressing about anything that isn’t under my immediate control is a waste of valuable time and energy.

8 ) You’ve gotta put in the time. Very true. Had I not put in all the hours of pavement-pounding prior to running this race, I would not have been able to finish. After all, I was also running handicapped (weak, tired muscles from the virus and lots of chest phlegm keeping me company, and then a fall and an injury early in the race on top of that).

Feeling suspiciously dubious of any innate ability I might have to actually finish this race, I had broken the usual race advice given to newbies like myself only three weeks prior to race day, which is: “Don’t run the full race beforehand. Adrenalin will carry you through for the last several miles.” So for a half-marathon, it’s usually worked into training programs that the longest run you ever complete is up to ten miles: on race day you’ll be so motivated and excited, the general consensus goes (proven to be correct for most people most of the time) that you’ll finish with flying colors.

But I knew in my gut that I couldn’t trust myself to accomplish anything in public (surrounded by thousands of runners) that I hadn’t first managed to complete at some level in my individual training. And so I ran both 13-mile and 15-mile training runs about a week or so before I got sick.

And you know what? It was ultimately the knowledge that I had done it before which made me know that I had it in me to do it again. In my case, had I not done those longer-than-race-day runs prior, I would never have believed in my sick, dragging state that I could finish, and I would have dragged my bruised knee and virus-discombobulated body off the track, deciding to try again in the future.

But I knew I could finish because I’d put the time in and had done it before…and that made all the difference.

9) Do the hard thing. Yes. The interesting thing is that this advice crosses over into other categories of your life. Years ago, I would not have thought I could run any form of race. But now that I have done a thing I once thought impossible for me, it’s interesting how many other “impossibles” start to look only like “very, very difficult improbables.”  The difference in a mindset of “impossible” versus “improbable but can possibly be achieved with enough time, effort, sacrifice, blood, and tears, not to mention the selling of one’s firstborn” is profound—there is simply no comparing the two. More things have now become mentally possible for me because I ran this race. It is my personal belief that I have little natural athletic talent or coordination, nor do I have any background of formally-organized sports activities. This journey was all uphill all the way, then: accomplishing this is one of the hardest things I have done. And it is for this reason that finishing this race is something I’m profoundly grateful for. Doing this particular “hard thing” has taught me much about myself, and it has enriched areas of my life very different from pavement-pounding.

10) Compete with yourself, not with others. If I hadn’t taken this on as a personal belief many years ago, I would have been in a world of hurt in the field of running. Consider the most recent case in point: on race day, I ended up keeping pace with two women almost twice my age. These fine ladies discussed what they’d had for dinner the night before, their social lives, and random observations on the race itself—this while running without appearing to break a sweat. Nor did they appear to ever need to stop talking in order to catch their breath. Unlike me, they could run for hours without breaking a sweat while also conversationally solving many of the world’s problems.

Of course, yours truly had already developed the eyes-glazed-over look of the truly-crazed psychopath (insert constant mental soundtrack of “I. WILL. FINISH! I. WILL. FINISH!” for the entire race, and you might catch a glimpse of my ferociously-one-track-minded concentration). I had no extra energy of any kind to make any form of verbal noise—it was all one foot in front of the other.

So you can imagine my bemusement when finally the one runner turned to her friend and said, “Ever notice the really fast ones never talk during these races?” Had I had the energy, I would have told her: “Dear lady, it’s not only the fast ones who never talk during these races. It is also us slow ones who never talk, because if we waste even a particle of energy during these hours, WE WILL NOT FINISH.”

I liked these ladies. And completely unbeknownst to them, they gave me hope—hope that years or even decades from now, I may have achieved a point in my running career where I, too, can talk about the weather, recipes, and random race observations in complete sentences without breaking a sweat nor running out of breath. For hours at a time, in fact.

Until then, the beady-eyed stare of crazed determination shall remain: the internal screaming soundtrack of hours of “I! WILL! FINISH!” shall have to suffice as companionship instead of pleasant conversation.

Perhaps in my next race I will be able to utter the words “Good morning!” at some point in the 13.1 miles? That seems a worthy aspiration~~and these ladies have inspired me to try and make it happen.

Feel free to post any of your own observations or wisdom gained from your own running and physical-fitness journeys~~I’d love to hear any stories that might in turn inspire me to get up off my couch and run in this cold and unforgiving weather.