Need the Miles

I ran eleven miles a few days ago and didn’t enjoy a single step.

It was a beautiful fall day, cool enough to not overheat and warm enough not to be cold.  I drove to a trail that crosses a refurbished wooden train bridge and offers spectacular views of the river below, the adjacent valley, and lush forests.

My legs needed the miles.  Two days from now I’ll run the Royal Victoria Half-Marathon.  Months ago, I’d set an aggressive time goal and started training hard.  But then I changed jobs, returned to shift work, and re-evaluated my training plan and the time and effort I wanted to put into trying to run fast.  This has happened to me before.  Many times.  I love signing up for races with ambitious goals in mind.  But every hour of training is an hour away from my family; worse, every hour away now feels like I’m gone for two or three hours, my days off made that much more precious because my workdays are long and tiring, and sometimes I hardly see my wife or daughter at all. 

My legs needed the miles but the rest of my body, including my brain, didn’t seem to want them.  I slogged through the run, spending most of my time wishing it was over.  Finishing was easily the best part.

I have a complicated relationship with running.  It is one of the most important things in my life, and I do it almost every day.  I’m convinced it contributed to me maintaining my mental health in my first twenty-four years as a cop.  I’m hopeful it will continue to do so now that I’m a cop again.

But I don’t always enjoy running.  The elusive ‘runner’s high’ seems to be mostly a myth.  My right heel and right knee are always sore, if not outright injured.  Trail runs aren’t always magical.  I know that I’m running in one of the most beautiful places in the world, but sometimes I get sick of looking at nothing but dirt, rocks, and green trees.  I’ve fallen very hard twice this year and was lucky to escape serious injury.  Since those falls, every rock and root along the way is a potential fracture laying in wait.  Road running has its own pitfalls.  Where we live, nothing – absolutely nothing – is flat.  Every run on pavement, is up and down, up and down, and then up and down some more.  Psychologically and physiologically running on roads here is a grind. 

As the half-marathon nears, now less than 48 hours away, my mind turns to time and pace.  How fast can I run it?  I’ll be thrilled with an hour and forty-five minutes.  I will be disappointed with anything over two hours.  Despite tossing my original training plan aside, my time matters, even though I’m very aware that with the possible exception of my wife, no one else in the world cares how long it will take me to run 13.1 miles. 

I’m fifty-five and still haven’t accepted that my best times are behind me.  But I know that to run fast I must spend many hours running long and running fast.  It’s been a long time since I was willing to make that commitment. 

One day before this week’s lousy eleven-mile run, I was on the verge of signing up for next spring’s Vancouver Marathon.  Not for fun.  Not just to finish it.  But to try and run it fast, push myself to the limits of what I’m capable of achieving, and qualify for the Boston Marathon.  The next day I had to battle myself to finish the eleven-miler.  I finished because I didn’t want to quit, and my legs needed the miles.  But afterwards, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to sign up for a marathon and commit to training that would require multiple long runs.

This Sunday’s finish time is already in my legs and my lungs, essentially pre-determined by the training I have done and the training I have not done.  The race will hurt and I won’t enjoy it.  Scenic courses don’t matter much when you’re suffering. 

My wife and daughter will be at the finish line.  We’ll enjoy the day and the weekend.  But the numbers on the clock will matter to me.  I just don’t know how much they’ll matter, or if I’m willing to work harder for better numbers in the future.  I don’t know if I’ll need the miles enough to accept the pain that comes with them.