As some readers might know, I was a runner when I was younger. I ran track and cross country for my high school and college teams. I was a decent runner, if not a great one. In high school my times were around 2:02 for 800 meters, 4:34 for 1600 meters, 10:12 for 3200 meters--good enough to win a few races in my area, but nowhere near good enough to attract the attention of college coaches. I went to college with academics in mind but decided I might as well participate in the crummy no-scholarships running program the school had. There I managed to raise my performance a level or two--still far from stardom but good enough to hold my head high as a respectable collegiate runner. I broke 27 minutes a couple of times on 8-kilometer cross country courses, and my greatest achievement was probably clocking 8:52 in an indoor 3000-meter race in Louisville's Broadbent Arena. Not long after that, I went down with a severe iliotibial band injury and was never able to return to that kind of form.
I graduated from college in 1990, and in the ensuing years I ran sporadically as my involvement in canoe and kayak racing increased. I did an occasional road race, and while working as a high school teacher I assisted with the school's cross country program and ran with the kids a good bit. I stayed in pretty good shape, albeit nowhere close to the peak form of my college career.
But by the early 2000s my efforts to run sort of petered out. I was spending a lot of time training in the boat, and seeing as how I enjoyed paddling more than running, I just didn't see much reason to keep doing the latter ("Runners don't paddle, so why should paddlers run?").
I'd hardly run a step for some 20 years when, at about this time last year, I decided to buy a new pair of running shoes and give it another try. Why did I decide to do that? Nostalgia, mostly. I'd been watching some You Tube footage of Olympic and world championships races of the last decade, and decided that I sort of missed being able to go out and run a mile or more and have it feel good and smooth. I also wanted another cross-training activity in the mix as my tolerance for cold-weather paddling diminishes.
For my first time out a year ago, I figured 20 minutes was a reasonable length of time to run. Anybody can run for 20 minutes... right? But it was no more than a couple of minutes in that I realized just how out of running shape I was. All the cardiovascular infrastructure that I'd built up from high school into early adulthood was gone. I tried to settle in for 20 tough minutes, but I ended up stopping well short of that because of pain in my Achilles tendons.
I attempted two or three more runs last December, with similar results. Finally, after injuring one of those Achilles a bit more severely, I decided to give it up until the arrival of warmer weather.
At the end of April I gave it another try, and this time I radically lowered my expectations of the distance I could handle. I did just a short lap around the block here in my neighborhood--a distance of maybe 800 meters or so. For the next couple of months I used this around-the-block run as my warmup for gym sessions. The main thing I remember about those runs is that they never seemed to get any easier; each one felt like just as much of a chore as the first one had felt.
In July I took my trip up to New England, and once I was back home in early August I didn't feel like doing much of anything beyond some unstructured weekend paddling. By November I was starting to feel like a slug and decided it was time to get back in motion. If you've been reading this blog lately, then you know that my current routine includes some paddling, some bike riding, several exercises with a medicine ball, and some running.
Twice a week, I've been going over to the park just west of my home and running the perimeter of a big grassy field (we call it the "Greensward"). A lap around the Greensward is probably somewhere around 1000 meters, and over time I've been nudging that distance up by cutting fewer and fewer corners. Each time out I've run a lap, done a couple of sets of medicine ball exercises, done a couple of sets of runs up the front stairs of a nearby building, and finished with a run of maybe 500 meters. While I haven't been setting any speed records, it finally seems like running is getting a bit easier for me--a tiny bit, at least. For a while I was having doubts about whether I would finish each run, even with less than 50 meters to go; but in the last week or so I've noticed that I'm feeling less that way.
I have no lofty plans to resurrect my running career; as I noted above, I enjoy paddling more than running and I think I will continue to satisfy my competitive urges that way. But maybe... just maybe... I can get back to thinking of running as "something that I do."
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