“You know, those superficial wounds bleed a lot.”
It was Thursday morning. My wife and daughter were still asleep, and I was heading out to get in one last run before a 5k race that was two days away. Having not run in about a month (two justified weeks of rest while we were on vacation plus two unjustified weeks of laziness), I decided to just get two short, higher-pace runs in during the week before the race, one on Tuesday and one on Thursday. Running 2.25 miles instead my usual 3.25 was my way of scaling down what I was asking of my body while hoping the increased intensity would prepare me best in the short timeframe. Unfortunately, the intensified run on Tuesday left my legs a bit more tired than I was accustomed to feeling.
When I set off for my Thursday run, I knew I wanted to run a similar pace to Tuesday but struggled mentally with the weight in my surprisingly heavy legs. My approach to running is predominantly mental. I always make a plan before heading out on a training run or running a race, and I work hard mentally to push my body to execute it. Most of the time, I lean on my long-learned ability to separate pain from injury to try to run hard at the upper end of my capacity.1 On this particular Thursday morning, my mind was working hard to overcome the sluggishness of my body.
Heading north, a few houses from turning a corner to run my last length south and into the home stretch, my toe clipped the front end of a raised panel of sidewalk. In what I can only imagine was comical fashion, I athletically and gracefully hit the deck, catching my falling body with my right forearm and elbow, as my right knee and ankle followed closely behind. After about a one-rotation barrel-roll, I was on my back in the mulch of someone’s front lawn. With a couple deep breaths and a chuckle at myself, I was sat up and realized no one was around to see my blooper.2 I shook my head, picked myself up, and finished the run.
When I got home, I grabbed the imposing brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide and, with my leg propped up on the bathtub, induced a healthy fizz from my road rashes on my elbow and leg. When my wife, Katherine, woke up, she inspected my scrapes while listening to my story. After asking the requisite triage questions, she clinically informed me, “You know, those superficial wounds bleed a lot.” And it sure did.
The hard part to deal with isn’t that I fell. I struggle with arrogance, but I am not beyond self-deprecation and making fun of myself. I’m fine. It probably looked hilarious. The real challenge is learning the realities of my life and gaining understanding and peace. The hard part is realizing new limitations and embracing new opportunities to learn about myself. Whether physically, mentally, or spiritually, these moments can be fruitful to someone who stays grounded in a growth mindset and a lifelong desire to learn, and I hope to take that approach. So how can I stay on that better path? How can running keep me grounded and growing in the right ways?Well, the increasing physical limitations will be tough. Whereas I think some people pick up running as an adult hobby, I’ve been running since I was 11. I love to run, and I’ve experienced some quantifiable successes. Luckily, I always had coaches and teams in those middle school years who were all about individual growth and improvement as a means to team success. So as I continued to run, for conditioning or training for other sports or eventually as a personal hobby and wellness discipline, that foundation from coaches helped me feel most motivated by “racing myself,” by choosing different distances, races, and training regimens to try to challenge my ability and grow. My new task will be reunderstanding that self-competition as I age.
Typically, I’ve sought improvement by trimming seconds or minutes off of personal best times in races. However, as I get a bit older, the raw time improvements may be harder to come by as my body’s recovery ability slowly begins to fade. In college, I rarely felt the residue of tough runs even just a few hours after they ended, but now the stiffness and soreness lingers more. Thursday morning, as I stretched, I knew I’d need some more mental toughness to keep my pace; I did not realize I was pushing my body past its reasonable ability. Because my legs were so heavy but my mind was pushing them to an excessive pace, I wasn’t picking up my feet the way I needed to do at that pace, and that’s what sent me for that hard tumble. That sort of limitation is a totally new wrinkle in this calculus that I have to incorporate into my mental game. Last week’s race was a first try at this.
As I drove to Saturday’s race and got ready to run, I was thinking about reasonable expectations. My PR for a 5k is 21:08, which I ran as a 25-year-old. I know I probably won’t come close to that again. Last year, in this same race, I had run a 23:34, and I thought that was possible again. With mile-by-mile split clocks on the course, I hoped I could get 7:20 splits, which would put be ahead of that time and down toward a 23:00 finish. As I rounded a corner toward the Mile 1 clock, I saw 7:20 had passed, and I was starting mile two at about a 7:35/mile pace.3 Thinking about what’s reasonable, I resolved to push what I could to at least run even splits.4 I held my pace until the last quarter or half mile or so when I let up a smidge to ensure I could burn it up for the final sprint, my favorite part of a race. And when I rounded the corner to enter the football/track stadium, I had the head of steam I wanted and finished with a properly strong sprint.
My 23:58 (7:44/mile) that morning is the slowest official 5K time I’ve run.5 Engaging with my abilities that morning helped me learn to start racing my future self (the me that is slowly aging) rather than my past self (which an old running buddy once described as a “jackrabbit”). I’m learning that while it’d be awesome to race the me from years past, the more effective competition (and the one less likely to cause me injury) will be between me and my aging self. How do runners’ times change as they age? Can I stay ahead of the curve? Can I run at the top of my ability, even if it doesn’t mean beating PRs from past years? The goalposts need to move, and I’m learning how to reset them. A reasonable start is to run in a manner by which I don't wound myself and bleed a lot.Thinking about all of this called to mind the elderly relatives I’ve seen age (and some already pass). It makes me think of the ways that the younger generation or two that cares for and accompanies them often hopes for the best in older age… Man, I hope I’m that sharp when I’m her age! … Please tell me if I’m being that unpleasant when I’m old… Poor guy, just doesn’t realize he can’t control everything anymore. As with most things in adult life, mature perspective only comes when we invite, welcome, and engage it. I think these small moments of limitation are great for humility and reality within me. It helps challenge me to separate that which is in my control and that with which I need to find peace.
To a certain extent, my body’s health is my responsibility. By eating reasonably, exercising regularly, and stretching properly, I can keep my cardiovascular health in decent shape and mitigate certain health risks. Yet, sometimes, my muscles may be sore for longer and recover more slowly, and I may not be able to execute the duration or pace I want to achieve. My mental processes and my self-discipline have to stay attuned to keep knowing the difference between pain and injury, to distinguish what’s pushing myself and hurting myself.
For most of my life, running has been a way to challenge myself to physical growth, athletic success and improvement, and mental exercise. It can continue to be all of that. But it now even more so is becoming a way for me to understand myself, my body, and my limitations, and a way to engage peacefully and actively with what I can handle. Running will continue to be a good heartbeat rhythm to embrace and a way to continue being a lifelong learner. And if my head gets too big or I stop paying attention, I may just fall and bleed a lot again.
1 Pain is soreness, stiffness, fatigue, etc. Injury is a strain, a pull, an -itis, etc. One can run through a certain amount of pain to sustain a workout and build stamina and endurance. One should not run through injury, which usually can be aggravated or worsened with exertion. Also, I realize that it’s sentences like these that make non-runners hate or otherwise not understand runners.↩
2 On the one hand, I’m glad, because I imagine the sight could’ve freaked someone out. On the other hand, I think it could have been a great laugh to the right spectator.↩
3 Can you why my running career thus far has focused on improving my times? The numbers game comes naturally to me, and I enjoy it a lot. Though, even with times, I’ve softened, as I used to time all my training runs; now, I only time races and take the training runs at natural, mentally set paces.↩
4 Often, longer races cause runners to deteriorate gradually, such that each successive mile is run more slowly. Some runners train or run to have negative splits, where they preserve themselves early and exert more later to run faster in the latter part of the race. Even splits simply means that you try to sustain one pace for the duration of the race.↩
5 Again, I race primarily against myself. To those who can run faster, mad props to you. To those who run more slowly, don’t worry about my time versus yours. For all of us, let’s race our ghosts, and work to be healthy, well, and growing.↩
No comments:
Post a Comment