Getting and feeling tired is often the point
Modern data streams offer handy substrate for validating exercise, but the body alone occasionally "memorizing" a run is an atavistic and worthwhile treat
At some point last fall, my cell phone crashed, first in the slangy sense of “stopped working” and then literally into a concrete patio surface. As far as I know, the Garmin Connect app is required for synchronization of activity between a GPS watch and the Garmin PC interface. Because I took my time replacing the fallen Android, my activity wasn’t updating, and I no longer knew for sure how much I was walking and running unless I took the minute or so per day required to consider the matter consciously.
I’ve had a phone again for weeks, and I use the Garmin app to examine the exercise of others. But when I was without a phone, I reverted to using an old Casio non-GPS watch with a Velcro strap to keep track of my running without formally logging any of it.
As soon as my steps were no longer being automatically tracked, I started to wonder how psychologically reliant I was on formally knowing how much foot-wandering I was doing, in addition to being obviously aware that I run virtually every day. And so I haven’t returned to using the GPS watch—a practice handy for being ignorant not just of exactly how much ground I cover but also of how infrequently I sleep.
With the footing having been icy for several weeks, I’ve slowed the pace of my runs, especially when running with Rosie. I’m still out there for around an hour a day, but on many of these days I’m sure my heart rate hasn’t risen above 60 percent of max.
These expeditions are worthwhile for their sunlight-gathering, and for the fact that an easy run brings me (and probably most people) at least 80 percent of the way moodwise from wherever I was to wherever I’d been had I run all-out, or at least hard-ish. That’s a restatement of “any run is worth it,” an idea supported by the fact that merely going for an easy stroll outside is a mood-enhancer.
But sometimes, I need to feel taxed—not just in the act, but afterward. Even the next day. I rarely run hard enough to effect real-time “distress” or next-day woes of any sort. And sometimes it’s good to have that reminder of having done more than simply collect visuals and check a mental “moved around” box. Especially when everything else seems ruined beyond repair.
On Monday, Rosie hurt her paw when we were walking and getting ready to run. She’d already requested we take the car for the day’s jaunt, which she does by standing next to the car rather than continuing up the street to the path network when we step outside. She didn’t cry out; she just stopped, lifted her left front paw, and looked at me as if she had a thorn or the like in it, as occasionally happens. But when I looked at it, I saw and felt nothing.
When she put her paw down and started us both running, I figured whatever it was had passed. But although she happily coveted squirrels for close to an hour, including stops for whatever, she seemed to be favoring that paw. And that night, she was standing and walking using three legs, which was upsetting to watch even though she was otherwise behaving normally.
The next morning, there was no sign anything had happened to Rosie’s paw. We drove to a different regular starting point by the hospital. And when she started running, not only was she showing no sign of a paw problem, she was hauling ass like she does about once every three or four weeks. She would have run 6:00 pace if I’d let her, and for a few minutes I probably did, as a strong wind was at our back. We roared past a struggling hottie and blew her a kiss. But when we turned directly into the wind on the Goose Creek Path, she wanted to keep up the pace because this stretch of path is Prairie Dog Alley.
The prairie dogs here are intoxicated, because they live in burrows on a slope between large industrial grow-houses and the path itself; the whole open-air conduit stinks of weed, even in gusty winds. As a result, these prairie dogs are typically impaired and chittering at discomfiting volumes in rodent-stoner-code while flopping around stupidly in plain view of path users. When one of those path (and weedstink) users is Rosie, I have to be careful to prevent violence, because if I let her, as sweet as she is, she would probably saw a prairie dog in half just to see where all that noise comes from.
The issue of focus on Tuesday, though, was not the cannabinoid-charged fauna but the wind. Rosie in her eagerness five minutes into the run was simply refusing to account for the fact that she would soon regret maintaining so ambitious a surge. Anyone who lives in Boulder knows how sturdy the afternoon winds out of the west can be, and on Tuesday they were fierce. As I fought at times to just move forward, I couldn’t help noticing that Rosie, low to the ground and shaped like a bullet, was far better constructed for the task of charging into a gale than I or any human larger than a standard baby could be. She was also dumbly unfettered by the automatic ennui any human runner experiences when confronting a headwind even when in no hurry at all.
It wasn’t long before I realized that I was experiencing something now rare: I was struggling to keep up with another runner. I’ve mentioned that I sometimes engage in half-assed pace surges on my own, but even then I’m controlling the level and duration of any up-tempo efforts. In this case, Rosie, who will turn nine in March, was giving me a test.
The bitch was almost straining on her leash, and she was having fun. I can tell when this is the case because under these circumstances, anything I blurt out from five or six feet behind leads to a one-two shoulder dip, a dual-ear twitch, and a scanning of the horizon. (She never seems to dislike running, or much of anything, but it’s clear that she is sometimes just treating it as rapid-sniffing time and is mostly on autopilot. She also needs to roll spastically in loose, dry snow almost wherever it appears.)
That Tuesday run lasted about thirty minutes, and overall it wasn’t that hard. But I didn’t go out for a second run alone that night even though the winds had died down and I kind of felt like I should.
Yesterday, Rosie and I did a near-repeat of Monday, spending a very easy hour or so pattering along through East Boulder. When I was done, my mind flicked an “exercised today, something accomplished” switch out of habit. But hours later, I felt like I hadn’t run at all. And dammit, sometimes it’s nice to get into a rhythm and pound for a while, and do this in a way sufficient to enforce a paying a meaningful toll for modest, conscious extravagance.
So I went out at 10:15, found a strip of lit path near the college campus I knew was free of ice, and ran pretty hard for a while. It was in the low thirties and windless. I liked that I made little sound, even if this was mainly a function of wearing old rubbery racing flats and not having a bouncy stride. I liked having to breathe hard to do what I was doing. A gibbous moon had risen within the past hour or so, its light reflecting off the white domes on top of the two or three campus buildings signaling telescopes beneath, a sense of natural continuity between these objects even though I doubt the magnification equipment at C.U. East Campus is ever used for scrutinizing the Sea of Tranquility.
It was a good place to be. I thought about the times decades ago when I actually went to the track this late, even in the winter (though not often then), and did a workout “only” because I had a race coming up sometime soon. But was that ever really true? What was I proving even then and to whom? Who cared, or does? Or ever will? I felt reconnected across twenty years to a peculiar and satisfying level of task orientation even though my conscious plans then and in 2023 share few commonalities.
The road I was on, along most of East Campus, didn’t even exist at the turn of the century. Meanwhile, back in Concord, N.H., most of my favorite off-road routes from my training heyday have either become overly apparent to other members of the public or been eradicated by development.
I sometimes enjoy running like I mean it for fifteen or twenty minutes. This was true from my earliest attempts. You never know when you might have to keep up with someone else, and it’s nice to retain a little sense of what that challenge will feel like, especially these days with no real fitness to support such an adventure. At any time, and without warning, I may have to outrun a phalanx of surly police officers half my age, and be prepared to scale fences in the escape.
Maybe I just want to live while I still can, and report what this experience was like.
That run ended very recently. Tomorrow—or today, when you read this—I expect to be sore or at least momentarily confused at sensations in my legs when I climb out of bed. Since this will not interfere with my plans in any way, I will welcome it. It should go nicely with whatever I see in the mirror. I am not fraught over the realities of physical aging, but I admit to sometimes being momentarily confused at my upon-rising reflection as well as what I feel in my legs. Sometimes, as I stand in the bathroom contemplating the wreckage, I do not merely think, but actually croak, “That has to be bullshit,” and start running my fingers over my own wizened, spiky-haired image in pure childlike wonder.
I have been working on improving my diet, too. People say food should be enjoyed, so I indulged in some comedy carbs to see if they lived up to their billing.
(There are some entertaining crackers on Rumble, too, but a strong stomach is required to digest much of what they say.)
Maybe this is as simple as wanting to occasionally feel like I have earned some of the time I spend sitting or lying around. Or increasing my chances of sleeping for more than four or five hours at a time. I am at this point solidly convinced that I will not be entering any races.
But if I keep immersing myself in familiar sensations—and that sudden feeling of “there is only so long I can hold this now” hasn’t changed at all since I was fourteen years old, even if I shunt it into a variety of mood-dependent places now—then I will be at risk of setting concrete goals, and at this state in my drawn-out full-body apoptosis, that’s just not a risk worth taking. I just need to remember what I’m getting into whenever I even remotely imagine succeeding at anything concrete.
I will settle for now for the abstraction of occasional muscle protests and raspy exhalations into a January evening void or the slipstream of a jubilant dog, being thankful for the health of our paws. And for whatever motivates me to make certain important choices.