Running as a series of charging stations and oases in life's sandstorms
What do runners who skip runs in "Why I run" situations do instead?
On Wednesday afternoon at 5:30, I returned home in fading daylight from a 30-minute run, my second of the day. I had felt so good out there that only rising winds kept me from making one last 10-minute loop around the extended neighborhood.
I came home to an emergency. I had noticed that my neighbor's door was wide open, and when I checked my phone, I saw that my neighbor, who's 75 and unduly active, had called within the past few minutes. Without listening to his voicemail, I headed over and found him on his living-room couch, trying to call someone else and breathing heavily.
“I fell and I need to go to the hospital,’ he said, his hands on his knees, looking at the floor. Grimacing. “I think I broke my back.”
This guy is a former high-level martial-arts instructor and avoids doctors to the point of impenetrable distrust. Now, he wasn't even pretending not to be in agony.
“Okay,” I said, thinking is it really a good idea for this guy to move at all after a back injury? I had no clue what had happened. “Did you wipe out on your bike?” I was already reaching for the keys to his SUV, because there was no way we were riding even the two miles to the hospital on Boulder’s shitty roads in an ancient MINI with an adventurous suspension.
“I must have blacked out,” he said, trying to rise to his feet. “Probably.” I helped him outside and into the passenger seat of his car more or less as I would have done if he'd been missing a leg—lots of leaning and short stutter-steps. No ice, thankfully. Then it took a minute to figure out there was no ignition, just a button that would work as long as the key was nearby. It was in my pocket, but I hadn't noticed there was no key on the “key”—it was just a fob with buttons.
The next ten minutes represented a paradox of trying to get my friend to the hospital as quickly as possible while driving at 10 miles per hour, both of which he was ordering me to do in a hectic flip-flop. I couldn't go 10 MPH on the highway at rush hour, or anytime. It was shorter to take residential streets anyway. But also bumpier.
“I can tell it's swelling,” he said as the stoplight a tenth of a mile from the hospital came into view. I had no solid idea of what “it” even was. I didn't know what he'd hit, but he apparently hadn't done anything to his spine. Maybe.
Two ugly minutes, silent other than my friend’s obviously painful respirations, crept by before I pulled up to the emergency entrance, hopped out, got my friend out with encouragingly little added trauma, and walked him through the automatic door. I could see that the place was practically deserted. That was good; well, it's always good, but on Wednesday night I was in a windbreaker and running shorts and not prepared for a long wait. I was dressed exactly like a standard beaming Boulder doofus would dress to drive a buddy to the hospital, but on a day 30 degrees warmer.
A masked attendant-person rose to her feet and thrust two fresh blue masks our way, one in each hand. She looked grimly happy to do this, so her name was probably Joyce, Heather, or Carol. And I'm pretty sure she'd have done the very same thing, offering the same casual, bland-thoritarian demeanor, had I strode into the place alone and cradling a freshly severed human head under one arm.
My friend was unceremoniously checked in, during which process he called his daughter in Denver to apprise her of these sudden infelicities and effectively put her in charge of his situation.
I said a wincey goodbye to my friend, now in a wheelchair, and stepped outside into the welcoming chill. Mask off. Whew. I hope I never see the inside of a hospital again, unless I find myself gazing up at the drab ceiling of a morgue, too wonderstruck at the turn in my fortunes to even mutter a single dazed word of gratitude.
I drove the modern car home, went inside, gave Rosie a hug, and realized I'd just dealt with a nasty, uncertainty-laden situation. I'd only needed to be a conscious adult with a driver's license, but everyone who doesn't live in a vacuum takes a turn or two as a happenstance hero or heroine. And we've all been shepherded though our own traumas by people like those.
The next day, I learned the damage tally: Seven to nine broken ribs and a lung contusion. My friend had fallen, loaded his bike onto the rack at the bike park, and driven himself home before realizing how miserably banged up he was.
That day, Thursday, was bitter cold and it snowed about four inches. Poor Rosie refused to stay outside for long enough to take a dump until 10 p.m., half a day later than her usual initial offloading of dietary ballast. When she finally assumed a squatting position in the new, fluffy snow, I had to do that thing all dog owners do from time to time, but none voluntarily mention—scoop out a space under her butt for the ballast to fall, thus forestalling a potentially fur-besmirchng case of obstructive defecatory futility.
Earlier, at around 3 p.m., I'd dared a 20-minute run. The frigid weather wasn't an issue; the snow-covered frozen ground was, though—for some reason I was unusually attuned to the likelihood of a fall with serious-to-grave consequences. I had a weird kind of survivor’s guilt that couldn’t decide whether I was wrong to have gone running at all or wrong to have not stayed out there for an hour if I was going to bother at all.
Yesterday, my friend was discharged and is temporarily staying with his daughter's family, where he's a regular visitor anyway. By mid-afternoon, much of the snow had melted, the sky was an almost unblemished bright-azure dome over a windless Front Range, and it was a great day for an April run in mid-February. I did thirty minutes with Rosie near the golf course for commoners and ran into a young guy I know who claims to read this site—don’t they all—who was back to full-scale triathlon training after putting a late-summer stress fracture behind him.
If Rosie hadn’t been with me, I’d have stayed out for another half-hour. But she’ll be nine in less than a month, and to a dog who always trains in a dark overcoat, 55 degrees or so American feels damned warm for a midday run. So I limit her individual bouts of running even when she doesn’t appear tired.
I ventured out for another 40 minutes close to dusk, this time alone and thinking about races that would happen the next day over two thousand miles away, having already set up the proper browser tabs for viewing the live results of these competitions as well as the races themselves. This was a typical Friday run for me, getting excited about one or more races featuring people no one else in Boulder knows or has even heard of.
And I wondered: Isn’t this as much a part of habitual runners’ motivation for getting out there as dodging the blues, or earning the right to check a private “I did it” box? Thinking about an upcoming something that carries a good chance of yielding pleasant results, and exploring the possibilities under the influence of endorphins and dopamine, is as much a part of being a committed runner as getting out there when fending off the blahs on a bad-weather or bad-head day is the only real victory.
Feeling good—distracted in a useful instead of anxiety-provoking way—and going running mainly to check off a private “I’m still alive and this is what I do” box afterward aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, when I feel settled enough in my own skin on a given day so that I don’t “need” a run, getting out there is just as much of a triumph over inertia as it is when I feel like hurling myself into a lake of soon-to-be-ignited vinyl chloride.
If I’m not training for anything and just want a run, whether it’s to subdue or quiet staticky internal adversities or amplify a rare instance of inexplicable elation, then it’s probably a good idea to grab it. So I do, even if it means breaking conventions like waiting a certain number of hours since my first run of a “doubles” day. Within reason—I don’t have an entirely random schedule, but it’s been trending that way—I go running when it feels like the right move. And since I don’t count miles or minutes even for my own benefit, let alone anyone else’s, I can usually trust these internal prods.
I often see posts from folks in the running-advice business along the lines of “Got out for my first run in weeks,” and I wonder how and why the hell this sort of “I love running but rarely do it” pundit has become so common. As I’ve noted here before, I empathize with being physically healthy and being on a non-running streak, because I often existed in that state during my drinking years. But people who transcend “You can forgive yourself for taking a day off” to “I can forgive myself more easily if you sit on your asses, too” have become common figures in the joggersphere, appearing here as a columnist for Women’s Running or there as a super-sized “influencer” who spends more time at the nearest Golden Corral than moving his body around.
Yes, it’s fine to never run at all, or do anything that’s basically an exercise in vanity that may or may not accrue benefits to others. But I don’t understand people who love to think of themselves as runners while on a continual hunt for reasons to remain a pure observer and wryly pass these slacking strategies along to others on Twitter.
When I am running consistently, I imagine keeping open a channel, or circuit, that allows a current of exertional empathy to flow between myself and anyone I might discuss running with, even someone I disagree with. I realize there are good coaches and advice-givers who have sat on their asses for years or have been happy fat bastards for most if not all of their professional lives, but I am not inherently well-formed enough for that. I need to be a doer if I’m going to keep dunking my ass into advisory and analytical roles, even self-assumed roles.
And thanks to recurrent events similar to what happened to my neighbor this week, I think of how precarious it might be to pass up any chance to go running couples to the urge to do it, absent other impending or in-progress obligations. And I think some of running’s chronically struggling angry bozos, people whose attitudes I question here along with their public output, might find their obligatory hostility toward running itself evaporating if they actually did some regular running.
There is only so long someone can go on recounting the joyous afterglow of a ten-miler when he or she hasn’t run even half that far at once in years. I think that a considerable number of people who would have been everyday runners years ago are now so emmeshed in social media and other online distractions that it’s dark where they are before they even know it, and it’s time for a Pabst Blue Ribbon or a toke instead of a run. You can drink and smoke weed and do other drugs, especially Demerol, and still run every day, at times quite stylishly. But now that I know I’ve officially reached mission creep, I’ll stop.
The take-home—if there is one—is that running advice, at least when it’s mine, makes more sense when it comes from a currently active version of the advice-giver. I don’t have to be in racing to offer advice to people who are, but I occasionally force myself to hurt a little out there for a few minutes just to see if this is more pleasing than not, which it is. At least the hurting is optional and represents useful intelligence, unlike the majority of stimuli lately.