May 2011
Pace Yourself Accordingly
I am learning a little about moderation and the wider perspective. I might even be learning a little of humility. All it took was a barely-metaphorical arrow to the heel.
The journey started when I went out to run an easy seven miler back on the thirtieth of March. I’d been logging in regular 50 mile weeks in preparation for Cincinnati, Ohio’s “Flying Pig” Marathon on May 1, and I was feeling pretty bloody fantastic, thank you very much. My weight was down to 214 lbs, and if I could keep things heading in the same direction I’d be racing at about 205.
Getting the weight off is important to me. The maths are very simple: The less I have on me, the less I have to carry 26.2 miles, and the faster I’ll run. It won’t make race day any easier, because I’ve found that the fitter I get the more I realise I can do, so I go out and, well, try and do it.
I’ve been aching to break four hours for a few years now, and after the lessons learned in the wake of last May’s disaster (where, in the Buffalo Marathon, I got severely dehydrated and puked my way through to my second-slowest marathon), I thought I was finally ready to go sub-4 in the marathon. I’d run every day since Thanksgiving (November 24), forced the weight down, and felt comfortable logging in the long miles.
Which brings us to that ‘easy’ seven a few weeks back. Here are my ‘notes’ from my running journal at runningahead.com that day:
“long, slow, achilles sore / almost numbish. walked once or twice to settle it down...”
Sounds innocuous enough: seven miles along the river, and when that old nagging Achilles irritation flared I’d done what I needed to “settle it down”. What that entry fails to show, and I have since learned, is that I’d suffered an overuse injury, and it wasn’t my Achilles that was playing up. Rather, precisely because I’d tried to run-through my Achilles tightness, the irritation, in protest, had traveled north in a more focused attempt to get my attention.
One of my running friends, a doctor, tells me that I’ve irritated the sheath between the Gastrocnemius and Soleus muscles.
My love affair with my 127 day Thanksgiving Streak led me to close my eyes to the signals of distress that in retrospect were blindingly obvious.
The next day I couldn’t even do a mile on the treadmill without that aberrant muscular tingling.
The injury stimulated a lurking fear. I’d had an excellent Spring season (by my standards), and was almost ready for my ‘comeback’ marathon. With the weather warming up and a new baby due in September, this was my moment to secure revenge over last year’s failure.
Thank God I drew from the hard-won wisdom of my running mates. I broke the streak and didn’t try to run through the irritation.
I didn’t run for two weeks.
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This is my first real running injury.
(OK – I sprained my ankle two years ago, but that was via a pothole, not overuse, and I ran a marathon on it four days later. An awfully-timed head cold is the reason that that one was also a supra-4 hour ‘failure’).
I have friends who’ve dealt with much worse. Many are still dealing with them, and some of them have had to accept that their running days are over, and the bike, which I so hated in those first few recovery workouts, is their new athletic home. So I shouldn’t complain so much. This I know. But in my defense, this is my first time, and we’re supposed to remember our first times, right? They are supposed to have an impact.
This has been a bad year for me as far as the grim arm of mortality goes. That cloaked old mongrel has crept too close to a number of people I love, taking some and causing repeated heartache to others. Not that my Achilles troubles are going to kill me – not even close – I’m not close to suggesting they are in the same realm.
But these hits are all harsh reminders of how tenuous this thread of life (that often seems so wild and robust) really is. Those miserable moments when I felt soreness after an hour on the bike, or a twinge while walking down the stairs, when the fear that all the hard work I’d done would dissipate under the cloud of injury and a comfort-food relapse, they coalesced to force me into reevaluating why I do this, and in the process I realised that I miss running. Not the competition or the fictive levels of self-control athletes are supposed to possess, but simple running for the sake of running. It is not about what I can get from running, but rather that which it freely gives. I’m becoming thankful for what I can do, and less inclined to moan about what I cannot.
It’s a process.
Perhaps the notion that I can do something to rehab the injury has helped. That I am not powerless. That’s where the new humility comes from – I’ve had to listen to my peers, rather than delude myself into thinking that my magical, and somewhat imagined, robustness will trump my physical limitations.
I’m also learning something about peace. I feel like a bit of a girl’s blouse even writing that word. Peace. It’s not quite the revulsion of Tybalt muttering: “Peace, I hate the word” (Romeo and Juliet) that I’m feeling here, but applying it to my mental state does make me feel like I’ve been taking girl-pills.
Perhaps Dylan Thomas was wrong, because it appears to me that sometimes the best option is not rage, but acceptance.
Part of this (dare I suggest it?) new maturity is probably due to a book my running partner Clyde gave me this past week: Amby Burfoot’s The Runner's Guide to the Meaning of Life.
Clyde said he keeps his copy (signed by Burfoot during a glam-breakfast at last year’s Boston Marathon, no less) by his bed. “There’s always something good in there”, he said. I finished it in two days and if I don’t keep it by my bedside, I’ll keep it in my car, instead.
Burfoot’s book is one of those things that came along at the right time. It did not teach me anything new, per se, though it did remind me to keep my strides short and legs piston-like when it comes to hills – useful advice when miles 6-8 in Cincinnati are reported to be hilly. And it possesses many of fascinating flashes of running-lore. But what it does best is encapsulate some of the conclusions I have been meandering towards this past month. Common sense conclusions many of us would come to given the time and space to think.
In this it is a beauty – instead trying to capturing thoughts, they are there for me in a compact volume. Coming across them like this is perfectly serendipitous – another psych-lite phrase that usually rankles – because it draws from an underlying base of wisdom I’ve not been running long enough to develop. What a blessing, I suppose, to capture these wise ideas as a thirty-eight year old, as opposed to when I’m an irreparably broken man with too many ‘bloodied head against the wall’ years behind me.
Burfoot (who won Boston in 1968) writes that “Distance running requires you to take the long view. It takes weeks and months, at the least, to get in shape. Give yourself time. Don’t make hasty and unnecessary mistakes. Remember: You’re in it for the long run. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Pace yourself accordingly.”
Pace yourself accordingly, eh?
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To be concluded in the June issue