It may not be obvious anymore, but people who yap about running often go for runs

Invisible gremlins on my wrist have collected a year's worth of interesting trivia

When I try look at the main page of this site as someone unfamiliar with it and its creator, and open a few posts at random, I don’t necessarily gain the impression of someone who has ever done much actual running himself—just a lot of pissing and moaning about whatever the harpies and grifters are up to, interspersed with some superficial numbers-crunching and cheerleading of athletes or their accomplishments that any lifelong couch-potato with enough verbosity and love of the sport could manage as deftly. In this regard, my own presentation is scarcely different from those of the pundits I complain about, apart from my vexatious insistence on siding with a commodity whose value keeps plunging, i.e., easily discernible and verifiable facts.

But I run virtually every day, demurring only when a too-daunting air-travel itinerary or genuinely dangerous weather gets in the way and ensures that any attempted running would just not be any fun—not worth the 20 minutes mainly so I could tell myself I’d gone running. I don’t think I had more than five complete rest days in 2021. I take days off for illnesses, but I haven’t had so much as a cold in over two years. (Being diligent about social distancing, plus a dose of dumb lifetime immunological luck, has its non-coronavirus-related perks in the greater realm of infectious diseases.)

I love the act of feeling myself thump, glide, creep, or wobble along (it varies) while watching whatever processes in the natural and human worlds are in motion. As an example of how I take delight in the utterly mundane, I often run through one strip of warehouses in the industrial section of East Boulder that is obviously dedicated to growing weed, and because I am apparently allergic to certain strains, I start sneezing almost as soon as I can smell the shit wafting from all sides. But I run through there anyway, partly because it’s funny to me to be a guy over fifty running with a dog through a huge marijuana farm in the form of giant sheet-metal boxes, but mainly because the next landmark is the Humane Society of Boulder Valley, which always excites Rosie because she evidently has fond memories of her nine days there in the early summer of 2018, a stay that ended when she moved in with me.

Next on this route is dodging cantankerous oldsters in the neighborhoods by the municipal golf course, which has one of the highest known concentrations of hyper-entitled assholes in the entire city. These folks complain about the runners and cyclists who have flocked to Boulder over the years to make use of “their” streets, but they should be bitching more about the wealthy homebuyers, mostly Californians, who have flocked here in a steady wave and driven up their property taxes as well as loaded up the rec paths with their quasi-glutarded offspring. Not enough to put rental rates beyond the reach of most of those runners and cyclists, but that’s coming soon, and runner-heavy towns like Louisville and Longmont are rapidly getting there, too.

After this, usually, is a roll through the park land around the East Boulder Recreation Center. Rosie seems to like showing off, and, as this expanse of fields is usually riddled with people and dogs and moving balls of various sizes and colors, she often picks up the pace when we run around the EBRC perimeter. From there, it’s about a mile and a half to home, and I never know which of several possible routes Rosie will select, which adds another layer of fun and intrigue.

Hey, I take what I can get.

None of this ever seems to take up any time. It just is time.

I don’t make a conscious point of running every day, the way I’m sure to take 65 milligrams of iron with vitamin C every night. Instead, I look forward to it and know I will the next day no matter how today’s running felt.

I have a lot of free time as well as a dog that loves being outside. Rosie gets as excited about ten-minute car trips to run through certain Boulder subdivisions as I would about being handed free tickets to see Peter Gabriel down at the Red Rocks Ampitheater, so even on days I might otherwise sit on my ass, which are rare anyway, I have a standing plan for almost every morning.

As long as it’s warmer than about 15 degrees and cooler than about 70 degrees on the American temperature scale, with bright sunshine driving that upper bound down some, Rosie is good for around 20 to 50 minutes, usually including one or two creek-dips and dry-off barrel-rolls in the grass. We usually move along at around 8:00 to 8:30 pace, but she’ll lead us through extended stretches at sub-7:00 pace (in American distance units) if we happen to be traversing a path through a prairie-dog colony or there are flocks of geese lining the route. (More than once, Rosie’s approach has spooked a gang of these sidewalk-befouling creatures flapping into the path of speeding traffic, and more than once we have watched one and only one of the poor bastards experience a midair collision with an oncoming two-ton guided missile. It is likely that at least one of these unavoidable mishaps was fatal to the goose, but only an idiot would even pretend to publicly acknowledge that his dog had just been responsible for the unwitting maiming or death of another animal. So, I just kept running, sunglasses and leash forward, every time.)

Rosie just turned eight, and although she’s not showing overt signs of old age, over the past six months or so I have become more reserved about taking her out for second daily runs. She gets a lot of walking in no matter what, and when I head out for a second time—usually after dark, and about five times a week—I usually leave her at home. This means I usually run a little faster, but I still almost never go for single runs longer than about 50 minutes whether Rosie is with me or not.

I know some of this speed data from timing selected sections of runs on measured stretches of paths, but I rarely use the timing function on my Vivoactive watch. Instead, I look at the time of day when I leave, decide loosely what group of streets I’ll be covering, and allow the watch’s “Move IQ” function to track when my body is running. It collects this and related data quite accurately, though I’ve been told the watch may occasionally mistake extended bouts of masturbation with the use of an elliptical trainer (both mobile and gym-based).

I have now been wearing this watch for just over a year, removing it only to charge it. As a result, I can look back and see what my running and other elements of my day (like sleep, which we* won’t talk about) have looked like with no other plan besides “get out there, maybe twice, maybe not.”

The first thing that jumps out at me is how eerily I have scaled my self-selected activity level to the time of year. I have always loved autumn no matter where I have been, and this sinusoidal bar-graph is one more manifestation of that allure.

You can see that I averaged just over ten miles a day on foot over the past year, and spent about 76 minutes a day either walking or running for at least ten consecutive minutes (sufficient to trigger a “Move IQ event”). If I look more closely at the data, it appears that I ran about 360 minutes a week at an average of about 8:00 pace and walked about 450 minutes a week at about 20-minute pace. I also do about three miles a week of walking short distances, like to the kitchen, as does most everyone.

Based on the sheer fact that I’m able, for now, to do this much moderate work, there is no good reason not to take another shot at some racing this year like I did in 2018, other than the things that almost stopped me from doing it then and led me to give up before I had done anything I was satisfied with.

Most of us know someone who is always threatening to quit what he or she knows is a damaging habit, or at least promising themselves they’ll quit. My attitude about my running represents a sort of inverse of that: Instead of vowing to stop doing something bad, I’m continually promising myself I’ll start something good: Regular, intense, speed-focused workouts. I’ll start just as soon as I feel a little more comfortable going there; in the meantime, I’m balancing fears against perceived rewards and trying to figure out what the best possible outcome would even objectively look like.

Note that this is a little different from “I’ll start exercising tomorrow” or “I’ll start running tomorrow” in that I’m already past the theoretically hard part. I’m “in shape” enough to formulate goals and work toward them. I’m just not sure I like the idea of training to achieve results I’ll be inclined to be unhappy with and forcefully denigrate even if those results are solid, allowing for age, innate talent, and being ever more inclined to steal rather than purchase food or bypass it altogether.

I ran about a half-dozen races in the spring and summer of 2018, and all of them were bad. The best of them was probably a 37:53 10K in Fort Collins, worth at best 36:40 at sea level. It’s hard to get my brain to agree to even associate either of those times with a race result. I was never that fast to begin with, but I basically went from enjoying my best stretch of racing at 34 and being able to run sub-6:00 pace for 31.07 miles to almost immediately quitting competitive running for over a decade. I get what happens to people’s capabilities during those years, but that doesn’t mean I should have to accept that 6:00 pace is now my race pace for almost any distance held on the roads, apart, possibly, from fun-runs I’m too old to enter.

I found out in early 2019 that a blood test done in the spring of 2018 had shown a “normal” hemoglobin level. Technically, 12.1 is in the normal range for a male, but I was annoyed that I had to wait almost a year to get an actual number. This is because most of the para-medical types at your primary medical provider’s office whom you talk to on the phone are not equipped to deal with anything on a lab sheet past “flagged” or “not flagged.” This is a common problem, because even when the primary provider theyself is competent, that provider tends to be far harder to reach than the members of them’s beleaguered clinical staff.

Anyway, since it’s everyone else’s fault I was borderline anemic at the time, I will take sole credit for improving my iron status since—I don’t know what my hemoglobin level is, but having been good about supplementing in recent years as well as occasionally ingesting massive amounts of partially cooked ground beef basted in HFCS-rich condiments, I’ve surely pushed it higher than 12.1.

Still, I am just not man enough to face up to just how much I have slowed down over the years, and an honest bout of training and racing will expose the data confirming this inexorable but otherwise invisible slide with cold precision. I really don’t mind running hard per se any more than I used to; I can chug up a long hill and later find that my heart rate was surprisingly high, because, provided I’m not seeing what the objective output of my energy input is, I don’t think about how pitiful that reality would be. I usually think I have more in reserve, in fact, than I really do, so I might not merely be a coward; I might be deluded as well.

This tiptoeing around my own ego, and that’s mostly what it is, is not unique. And if I want assurance that I am in a gradual and comprehensive physical decline, I don’t need to run workouts or races to get it. I can instead note that every year I wake up about five minutes earlier to pee, or I can monitor how badly my balls have been claimed by the tendency of movable flesh to dangle and sag hilariously in middle age, or I can go hunting for excess hairs to attack and expunge in predictable places no one with any sanity would look at in the first place. Stacking some shitty 5K and 10K times on top of all that glee somehow seems a glum proposition. So I’ll get started—tomorrow, eight weeks from the Bolder Boulder, a local 10K that’s returning after two years in coronavirus-enforced hibernation.

I really have no idea why so much of the running media has been claimed by people who not only show no signs of regular running now, but never really did and have not developed any kind of unassailable relationship with the activity. Anyone can claim to be a runner, a lot more easily than the same person could claim to be a basketball or tennis player. But things have regressed to the point that people think that having an address book loaded with pro-runner contacts and symbolically tonguing their bungholes on social media somehow adds personal runnerness, perhaps through a form of aerobic osmosis only available to thumb-twiddling terminal suck-ups who imagine themselves as sub-elite go-getters, albeit ones waiting for the pesky June drizzle outside to stop so it’s safe to start training.

It’s a bummer to not feel joy about the prospect of competing with people again, though I have not ruled that out. I used to sometimes hate racing even when I was far better at it, so one or two solid experiences might be enough for me to recalibrate my expectations and accept that whatever I have to offer in the fitness basket is good enough—to pass the time, or just be the time. But it would be a major bummer to frame myself as a running expert while having no idea what any associated calculus even feels like, and have no internally developed concept what it’s like to both strive hard in this sport and lament the loss of vigorous intent that almost every competitive runner experiences with advancing age.

Running may not be as rowdy a friend as it once was, but it has proven a remarkably loyal accomplice.