A Pain in the Butt

This whole Caper thing has become a pain in the ass – literally. Today, I had the first instalment of 5 rabies treatments: one needle of vaccine in the arm and two needles stuffed full of Rabies Immune Globulin (RIG) in either side of my butt.

Last weekend, as I was trying to decide if I should get the shots or not, I made an attempt to locate Caper. I phoned the city and talked to a really helpful guy at the Call Centre. He suggested that I fill out a report of the incident, which we could do right then over the phone. He could then send the report over to Animal Control, who could search through the list of registered dogs to see if there was a match. It was a long shot, but what the hell.

I figured the earliest I would hear from Animal Control would be Monday, but I got a call from them only a couple of hours later. The woman who phoned said she’d searched the database of registered dogs for a dog named Caper. Doesn’t sound like a common name, does it? Well, she came up with 6 pages of dogs in the HRM named Caper. She didn’t say how many dogs were listed per page, but obviously it was way too many to track down, especially because I had no idea of the dog’s breed or if the dog was even registered.

After giving up on finding Caper easily and quickly, I gave Canadian Blood Services a call to see what was what. The thing about Blood Services is that they seem to conceptualize these types of medical eventualities in terms of deferrals. For a person bitten by a dog, the deferral is two weeks pending an investigation of the offending dog. For a person receiving a post-exposure treatment of vaccine and globulin, the deferral is one year. But what about a person bit by an unknown dog who has the choice whether or not to have the vaccine? My situation fell between the cracks. The nurse was very nice and very helpful, but she figured that my clinic would be wary about taking me as a donor if I didn’t fit into one of their categories. I may be an extremely low rabies risk, but extremely low isn’t the same as absolutely no.

So I decided to proceed with the rabies treatment. I have a rare platelet type, so I wanted to be available as a donor in case my platelets were needed again (that’s another story!).

After some back and forth with Public Health, they found me a doctor in Dartmouth to administer the shots while I’m here (the same guy who saw me at the walk-in). As they were setting up that end of things, I found a clinic near Julie-Ann’s place in Brampton that was willing to administer the shot (that was a weird phone conversation, let me tell you). Finally, the Public Health nurse arranged with the Peel Regional Public Health office to have some vaccine sent over to the Brampton clinic for the day I’m to receive my day 14 shot.

All the pieces of the rabies puzzle fell into place, and this morning I had the worst of it – and it wasn’t bad at all. On this first day of treatment (day 0), I received a shot of vaccine in the arm and two shots of RIG in the butt. The vaccine shot was no problem. I barely felt the needle and there’s no soreness in my arm. The RIG shots, however, were slightly uncomfortable. The needles weren’t bad, but there was a lot of fluid being shot into my muscle: I could feel it squirting through the interstices of my butt muscles.

After the shots, I felt a tiny bit lightheaded, but that sensation passed as I sat in the waiting room for the required 15 minutes. Apparently, after any vaccination these days, they keep you around for 15 minutes just to make sure you aren’t having a serious allergic reaction.

From this point on, I only have to get vaccine shots (no more RIG) on days 3, 7, 14, and 28. No sweat. The only interesting thing will be to see if the vaccine finds its way to the Brampton clinic for day 14.

So as we speak, my body is starting to create its own antibodies against the rabies virus. After all the shots, I’ll be free to get bit by any animal without worry. Perhaps I could work in a zoo or move into a bat-infested cave or join a wolf pack and run naked, chasing herds of caribou. Really, the possibilities are endless.

My only hope is that there are no hidden viruses in the RIG. The thing about RIG is that it’s made from the blood of people who have been vaccinated against rabies, so there are some minute risks. Fortunately, the blood has been screened, and it’s also been treated to destroy any potential traces of Hepatitis B or HIV. So I should be good.

So the caper has (hopefully) come to a close. As long as the series of vaccinations goes according to schedule, by mid January, I’ll be immune to rabies. Could be worse. Besides, everyone who has helped me along the way has been excellent. I’ve never had to access so many institutional services all at once before, but it all went well – in this case, modern civilization worked like it was supposed to against the dark, sharp-toothed forces that appear without warning out of the deep woods!

The Caper Continues

This dog bite thing has become very frustrating. I went to Canadian Blood Services today to donate plasma. Now, when you donate plasma, part of the deal is that you need to get a basic physical from their in-house doctor every year. It was my time to have a physical before donating today.

So he asks me some questions, listens to my heart and breathing, looks in my eyes and ears, taps me on the knees, and I’m good. But I figured I should at least inform him about the dog bite thing – it’s the kind of thing they need to know about. It turns out that he doesn’t really know if it’s a problem, so he phones some other doctor. After talking about their holiday travel plans for a few minutes, the doctor turns to me and says I can’t donate until they get a letter from my family doc saying I am rabies free.

Makes sense, for sure. You can’t be too careful with Blood Services. I asked him if there was some kind of test for rabies, but he had no idea. He assumed there was some kind of blood test. As it turned out later, he was wrong.

I figured I should deal with this issue today, so I went to the drop-in clinic in Dartmouth (I don’t have a family doc). After waiting for about an hour, I got in there and told my story. The doctor sighed and told me that this was going to be way more complicated than I was going to like. His instinct was simply to send me home and tell me not to worry about it because rabies is so rare in Nova Scotia, especially among domesticated dogs. But the problem is that because I didn’t get the owner’s information, nobody can be 100% sure that I wasn’t exposed to the rabies virus. If I had the owner’s information, all we’d have to do is wait 10 days and see if the dog was still alive. Apparently, once rabies sets in, it works very quickly.

In the end, the doctor decided that even though I would have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting rabies, he was still going to call Public Health to let them make the final call. The problem is that rabies is fatal if you don’t get it before it blossoms in your brain – so there is a bit too much at stake to be cavalier.

By the time I got home from the walk-in, I already had a message from Public Health, and just as I was about to call them, they called me again. Yikes. The lady from Public Health was very nice and assured me that her eagerness was only because it was Friday afternoon and they like to tidy things up at the end of the week. Phew.

Anyway… the woman was very nice and asked me for my story – I’m not sure so many people have ever heard a story of mine! She took down the info and asked some questions about things like the dog’s behaviour and so on and so forth. Then she told me to keep the line clear while she talked to the head doctor to assess my risk. It all seemed a bit dramatic to me, but rabies is no joke.

In only a few minutes she called back and told me what the doctor had said. Apparently, there hasn’t been a single case of rabies in Nova Scotia in years and years. And my case is especially low risk because it was a domestic dog that didn’t seem to be showing signs of ill-health.

But…

Because I don’t have any information on the dog besides the owner’s word, they can’t say that I’m 100% risk free. Sigh.

So what the doctor decided was that I didn’t have to have the series of vaccine shots, but I could get them if I wanted them. After all these expert opinions, it comes down to my choice.

Now I have to oh-so-enviable task of weighing pros and cons in this little game of rabies roulette. The very fact that Public Health didn’t descend on my condo with helicopters and men in toxic spill suits means that I’m probably okay. The chances are that I was not exposed to the virus, but the niggling little chance is still there.

The other factor for me to consider is my career as a blood donor. Without the vaccine, I assume I would be too much of a risk – the doctor at the walk-in clinic looked up the incubation period for the virus and (incredibly) it was anywhere from 20 days to 19 years! 90% of cases bloom after a month or two… but again, there is that rare chance that has to be accounted for. I haven’t talked to Blood Services about this end of things yet, but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t take me again without the vaccine. However, the deferral for rabies vaccination post-exposure is one year after the last shot.

Speaking of shots… rabies vaccination is notorious for being painful and dangerous… or so I thought. A bit of Web searching turned up a few testimonials that described the modern process as not much more painful than any other vaccination with the same small risks of side effects. The days of 50 deep injections into the abdomen are over (except in remote Indian villages).

But there’s yet another twist. The vaccine needs to be administered on precise days. After the first couple of shots (day 0), I need to go back on days 3, 7, 14, and 28. Not only does this sound not fun, it also coincides with our trip home to Ontario for Christmas! The woman at Public Health assured me that they could organize a shot with Public Health in Brampton or Kingston, but if I had decided to start the shots today, I would have needed one on Christmas! I can only imagine what kind of administrative nightmare it would be for them to organize all of this.

So I’ve decided to take the weekend to mull this over and gather information. I have no real concept of the risks of vaccination. My sources of information so far have been less than scholarly – and none of the government public health sites commented on the risk of pain and side effects from the post-exposure regimen of shots. Are the shots worth it?

All I had to do was to get the dog owner’s freaking phone number – but I didn’t know. Nobody ever said, “If you get bitten by a dog, get the owner’s information or else you’ll get stuck full of needles.” If this had been a car accident, I would have known to get the information – that’s drilled into everyone practically from birth. But this was new, and I mucked it up, and now I have to make this silly decision.

There is a moral to this story for every runner: if you get bitten, if your skin is broken at all, after you're done cursing at the owner, get his or her information – you’ll save yourself a lot of frustration.

Once Bitten… A Dog Caper

On my Sunday long run on the Shubie trail, I got attacked by a dog named Caper. Normally, I love irony – and there’s a nice bit of irony in being pursued by and jumped on by a dog named Caper. But I don’t love irony or biting wit when it literally bites me on the ass… or in this case, all over my calves.

I’ve had my fair share of doggie run-ins: I’ve been leapt on and tripped up by playful dogs – in on-leash areas, no less – while their mocha latte carrying owners look on with amusement, as if the whole thing were cute. I’ve been chased by dogs and incurred the wrath of an owner when my heel accidentally came in contact with her dog’s jaw (also in an on-leash area). I’ve been wrapped up in a dog leash as a dog darted to the side of an owner as I tried to pass. I’ve even stepped in a dog turd or two. But I’ve never before been attacked by a snarling, angry dog with sharp fangs.

Enter Caper.

I was about 8.5km into my usual long run route, running up a bit of a hill at a decent clip when I spotted a dog a little ways into the woods at the top of the hill. Technically, the trail is an on-leash area, but it’s not unusual to see dogs off leash, so I didn’t really think anything of it. The dog was staring at me with one of its forelegs raised and paw bent, but that didn’t mean anything to me. The majority of dogs on the trail are curious about runners but don’t get in the way.

As I came up the hill, the dog suddenly bounded after me. ‘Oh great,’ I thought, rolling my eyes. I assumed this was another playful dog looking for amusement, so I assumed my usual sideways protect-my-balls position and waited for the dog to leap up and for the owner, who was lagging behind, to call the dog off.

But this dog was anything but playful. It immediately latched onto my right calf and went postal, biting and scratching and snarling. It took me a few seconds to understand that the dog was indeed biting me and that what I felt really was pain, but by that time, the dog was all over me -- I could only curse and try to extract myself. All the while, the owner was calling the dog’s name, “Caper! Caper!” – but it took what seemed like an eternity before he grabbed the beast by the collar and dragged him away.

I’m not sure how long the dog was chewing on my leg – time is hard to estimate when all of your attention is focused on one thing – but it was enough time for the dog to leave a number of bloody tooth marks in my leg. I’m not sure what kind of dog it was: it was no Doberman, but it wasn’t a yappy little Chihuahua either – it looked like some kind of retriever, but with shaggy hair. The situation could have been worse, but it still sucked.

After the attack, I had no idea what to do, so I just kept running. What else could I do after getting bit by a dog? I wasn’t much in the mood for hanging around and sharing my feelings with the owner – although maybe I should have. It’s more than a little irresponsible to unleash your dog if said dog is a mangy beast bent on the destruction of all living things that move, especially in an area where people bring their kids. The on-leash by-laws are not there just to be a pain in the ass to dog owners – they are there to protect people and wildlife from the odd Cujo that’s being exercised.

As you can see, I’m a little bitter – the bites still hurt. And now I’m seriously paranoid about getting rabies, although when I asked the owner if the dog had its shots, he assured me that it had… but who knows, right? Just in case, I’ve shown Julie-Ann where all our heavy and sharp objects are stored so she can off me if I start frothing at the mouth.

Luckily, the wounds weren’t all that deep – they looked more like bad scratches than full-on punctures. But if I survive this wound, I’m not sure how I’m going to react the next time a dog comes bounding at me on the trail. It seems as though giving the dog the benefit of the doubt wasn’t the best call, but can I bring myself to lash out at a dog before it latches on to me?

I don’t want to hate dogs, especially because the vast majority of dogs and dog owners are well-behaved, but once bitten…

Dirty Shoes

What a beautiful way to spend an oddly mild Saturday morning in December: running with Cliff’s group in Point Pleasant Park, doing 3 x 8 minute and 1 x 4 minute threshold runs (3:40/km pace). Feels good to get on the trails and do some longer, more sustained pacing after so many weeks of shorter intervals on the track.

Today, I ran with Mike, and Mike was running in a shiny new pair of New Balance shoes – the same brand that I currently wear. He groaned every time we ran through some mud – I totally understood. It’s funny, though; I hate the glowing white of new shoes, but I also hate getting them all mucked up, especially in the first week or two. I guess it’s because running shoes cost so darn much. I want them to last as long as they can before I have to shell out another $150, and a dirty shoe seems closer to death than a clean one.

Thinking about Mike’s new (and now dirty) shoes, though, got me thinking about a question that’s been troubling me for a long time – a question that I’ve refused to ask in any meaningful way for years because, to be honest, I don’t think I really want to know the answer: is running gear made in a socially and environmentally responsible way?

Running shoe companies have been notorious for their less than stellar records. But that was sometime in the 90s, wasn’t it? Mike’s new shoes made me wonder if things are any better today. So tonight, I’ve been doing some preliminary searching on the web, trying to see if my New Balance shoes are the result of an ethical manufacturing process or not.

I started with the New Balance website, and (as you might expect) things looked pretty good. Here’s the first little factoid I learned from the corporate site:

“New Balance is the only athletic shoe manufacturer still making shoes in the US. We’re proud of that commitment. We're proud of the workers in our five New England factories. And we're proud to say that 25% of our shoes sold in North America are made or assembled right here.”

Hey, now there’s something you don’t see every day – running shoes made in the U.S. where there are labour laws and unions and some environmental protection laws (I guess). Could my shoes be part of the 25% that were made practically next door in Maine? I looked for the little U.S. flag on the heel and the Made in the USA sticker: nope. Crap.

Even so, it turns out that “Made in the USA” is not what you might think. Give New Balance credit, though, they are upfront about this, leaving it up to us as consumers to decide the ethics of calling shoes “Somewhat Made in the USA” actually “Made in the USA”:

“Where the domestic value is at least 70%, we have labeled the shoe ‘Made in the USA.’ Where it falls below 70%, we have qualified the label referencing domestic and imported materials. This determination is based in part on the Federal trade Commission's survey of consumers.”

Hmm. Well. Seems a bit fishy. But I guess a shoe doesn’t have to be made in the U.S. in order to be socially responsible. So where are the remaing 75% of New Balance shoes made? Well, the NB corporate website isn’t particularly forthcoming with that information. There’s a really inspiring corporate video about the factories in Maine, but nothing about where the bulk of NB shoes are made. And can you guess where they’re made? Take one guess.

Yup. China.

In order to get this information, I tweaked my Google search a bit from “New Balance shoes” to “New Balance shoes ethics.” Oops. One of the first hits was an article from 2006 published by WorldNetDaily entitled “New Balance 'pays workers 32 cents an hour': Report exposes harsh conditions at 'sweatshop' making American shoes.” Now, I’m not sure if WorldNetDaily is a reputable source of information: on the sidebar of the website there’s a link to the “Impeach Obama” website, so you know the site leans a wee bit to the right. And the study they cite is from the National Labor Committee and China Labor Watch – two organizations that I’m not familiar with. In fact, to make matters worse, the link the article provides to the study is broken.

I did, however, take a quick look at the National Labor Committee web site, and it looks pretty legit. I even found the report the article was talking about. In fact, there’s a press release on New Balance’s site concerning the report. Seems to me if a billion dollar corporation like New Balance notices and responds to a report from the National Labor Committee, then they are probably influential players.

Regardless, it’s no secret that manufacturing in China is not always carried out in ways we happy runners might like: below-subsistence wages, poor factory and living conditions, iffy work safety, mandatory overtime, scant worker’s rights, and so on. But we never come face to face with the manufacturing conditions of any of our gear. We just lace up and go for wonderful Saturday morning runs in the park while others labour long hours halfway around the world to make sure our slightly pronating strides don’t hurt our knees.

And what about the materials our gear is made from? What about the shipping? What about the disposal of the gear and the waste its manufacture produces? Just what are the social and environmental costs of all our gear?

To be fair, New Balance seems to have a lovely domestic corporate responsibility program. From breast cancer to girls in sport to trail maintenance in Maine, New Balance is giving away lots of cash to worthy causes. Does it matter that not one of those causes is in China? Should I care that New Balance is the official shoe provider for the U.S. military?

The messy fact of the matter is that running is not pure when it comes to social and environmental responsibility – our shoes are a little bit dirty. Running makes us healthier in body and maybe even in mind, but it does nothing to make us better consumers.

So what am I supposed to do with this fact? Stop running? Run barefoot? Run naked?

I don’t know how to answer that yet. But there are some questions that I think all runners should start asking: Where is my gear coming from? How is it made? What are the social and environmental costs?

And most importantly: how can we do better?

Julie-Ann and Monica: Training Wisely

It’s 6:30 in the morning and Julie-Ann has just left to catch the ferry to Halifax. It’s dark. It’s cold. It’s way too early. But she’s on her way anyway – on her way to meet up with Monica (our massage therapist) to do their second training run in preparation for a spring 10k.

Here’s the funny thing, though: Julie-Ann hates getting up early and she hates running. Monica hates running too. But they’re doing it anyway, God love 'em. And their mutual distaste for running makes them perfect, although unlikely, training partners.

This morning, as we were sipping our 5:00am coffee, I asked Julie-Ann why she was doing this, given her dislikes. She just looked at me and went back to her coffee. 'Perhaps it's a bit early for questions,' I thought, so I left it -- but not for long. Later, as we were eating breakfast, I asked her again. “I don’t think much about it," she replied with a shrug – "I just do.” 'Huh,' I thought -- 'that's so not like me.' Julie-Ann certainly is a doer – she leaves the brooding and cud chewing to me. In this case, it’s probably a good thing that she’s not over-analyzing: too much introspection would probably gum up the works.

So here's the program: at 7:00am, they’ll meet at the SMU track and run a lap. That’s it – one lap. The training schedule they’ve decided to follow really takes to heart the notion of starting small and building slowly. In this first week of training, they are meeting three times (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) and simply running one lap of the track. From there, they'll add one lap to their runs each week. So next week, they’ll do two laps each run, the week after they’ll do three, and so on. According to the math, it will take them 25 weeks to build from 400m to 10k. By May, they’ll be close.

For Julie-Ann, the program is starting a bit small – she ran a 5k last year and has been doing 2.5k runs fairly regularly to maintain her fitness. But she was more than happy to have someone to share her training with. In fact, having to meet Monica will be what gets her out of bed and into her running shoes as the mornings get colder and colder and as the bus ride seems longer and longer. If she’s scheduled a meeting, she’s going to show up – that’s what managers and administrators do. She doesn’t need dreamy goals and aspirations to motivate her in this case – she just needs an entry in her daytimer.

The training program was the brainchild of an athletic therapist that Monica works with at SMU. Monica asked him how she, a beginner, should build for a 10k. And I think his one lap progression idea was quite clever. Building slowly will give their bodies a chance to develop while minimizing the risk of injury. It’ll be interesting, though, to see how this all plays out when the mileage starts piling up. They may get to a point where they need to keep two of their runs at a certain level and just push one run as a long run. Either way, in building slowly, they’ll be able to learn to listen to their bodies and adjust the program accordingly.

The two haven’t decided on a goal race yet, and they’ve both wisely decided against having a time goal. For now, they're just running for distance and seeing what happens. As new challenges arise – time constraints, schedule conflicts, snow, boredom – they’ll meet them the same way every other runner does: any way they can.

A Breezy Entry

Okay. So I asked Julie-Ann for some feedback on this blog – you know, stuff like how’s the writing, is it interesting, is there anything you’d like to see? And during our conversation, I asked her about the voice in the writing: is it breezy enough? She laughed. She said it wasn’t breezy at all. I asked her is it at least conversational? No. Nobody talks like that, she said. It’s reflective, she said – introspective. She didn’t think this was a bad thing, but she thought that if I were trying to broaden my range, I should try different things. Apparently, the road from formal academic essay to reflective essay is not very long. Hey, I said – what about my little entry on the results of the National 10k road race? She read it. Sucks, she said. And worse, there was an embarrassing typo – and typos don’t count as broadening my range. Crap.

So she gave me an assignment. You want to write breezy, she said – then write breezy. Give me cotton candy, but don’t make me feel guilty like I might gain weight. What does that mean? I asked. Give me fluff – just fluff – without all of your self-conscious, broody stuff. Really? I asked. Really, she replied. She smiled slyly, clearly pleased with her idea: I think you’re going to have some trouble with this, she said. No kidding, I said. What qualifies as breezy and fluffy? Her grin broadened. You’re just going to have to figure that one out on your own. Great, I thought. Just great.

Hmm. Breezy. Here goes nothing…


Nipples. Man nipples. I never paid much attention to my own before I started running. They were there; they were unusual. When cold, they shrunk up and got hard. At one point, hair started growing around them. I wasn’t thrilled about that, but I didn’t really care. I mean, who cares about their nipples?

Runners do.

In fact, my nipples were the catalyst for my change from "runner who eschews running gear" to "runner who realizes the importance of good running gear" [Author’s query: can I say “catalyst” in a breezy article?]. Here’s how it happened.

When I started running, I wore cotton T-shirts, boxer-briefs, soccer shorts, and cheap cotton tube socks. Shoes were the only thing I didn’t skimp on. I figured shoes were important, but the rest of it? No way. Those “technical” shirts and skimpy shorts – designed for “real” runners – were purchased mostly by middle-class wannabes with too much disposable income. I figured, leave the pricey gear to those with talent and those who want to pose – I’m just trying lose some weight and complete a marathon.

And things went fine at first. I printed out my Hal Higdon training schedule. I started pushing my mileage. I felt smug and self-satisfied when I’d pass other runners whose gear was worth more than a month’s rent. I was cruising.

And then it happened. My nipples.

I remember the run vividly. It was a cold August morning: fall had slipped into town overnight, unseen. I went out for my run in shorts and a T-shirt (a white T-shirt, no less) expecting summery temperatures. I could feel the unexpected cold as soon as I opened the door to my apartment building. I could see my breath. Oh well, I thought. Nothing for it.

In the beginning, the run felt pretty much the same as every other run. In fact, after a kilometre or so, I was basking in the toasty warmth of a body hard at work. I passed some other runners wearing those really expensive Running Room jackets with the shiny silver strips and felt pretty smug. Actually, I felt tough in my shorts and T-shirt.

But after a few kilometres, I began to feel something. My nipples. They were getting a little uncomfortable. What was that? I kept running. The discomfort increased. I passed some other runners and they smiled at me. But it wasn’t a friendly smile – it was a smile I knew quite well: a smug smile. Did they somehow know I felt like my nipples were on fire? I had no idea what was going on.

By the time I got home, my nipples were screaming. I got up to my apartment and ripped my shirt off. As I was hanging it up to dry, something caught my eye. Holy moly – there were blood streaks all the way down the front of my shirt. I quickly checked out my nipples in the mirror. The tips were rubbed raw. I couldn’t believe it.

What I did next, though, was just crazy: I had a shower. Remember when you were a kid and you got a scrape during recess because you fell off the climber or you tripped and skinned your knee on gravel and the school nurse cleaned the wound with rubbing alcohol? Remember the sharp stinging sensation? Yup – that’s what a shower does to newly sandpapered nipples.

So I did a little research. Turns out that salt from sweat, plus erect nipples from cold, plus coarse cotton T-shirts, plus running equals pain. The cure: some Vaseline and some good gear. From that moment on, I’ve worn gear. Turns out that gear isn’t just for “real” runners – turns out that people don’t wear it just to be posers – turns out that it saves numerous body parts from all manner of friction-related ailments.

So that’s my breezy story about nipples and running gear.

The end.

Climbing Mt. Fuji

I tanked my track workout last night. Blew it. Didn’t even finish what I was supposed to. And I can hardly believe how crappy I feel about it.

The conditions were perfect. The temperature was an unbelievable 12 degrees, and there was Scotch mist gently blowing under the stadium floodlights. It was a magical night to be at the track. But it just wasn’t there for me.

My warm-up was fine. My legs were feeling a little sluggish, a little full of lead, but that’s not unusual. Normally that feeling goes away after a couple of repeats. Then Cliff laid out the workout: 2 sets of 8x400m @ 77s with 30s rests. Yikes. That’s a big load for me – and it’s fast for me too. But it should have been there.

I ran the first set with Alexander, and we were all over the map with our pace. At first, we were running in lane 1, but we were running way far out from the inside because there was a lot of standing water in the lane. I think that made us push the pace a little too much – and 77 is right on the VO2 max line for me. Anything faster than that starts to wear me down, especially with only 30s rests. After the first three intervals (78, 76, 76), we switched to lane 2 and started from the 400m stagger. That was better – but we discovered that our pace was way too rich: 74. No wonder I was struggling!

From there, we tried to bring it under control, but I found myself struggling by the end: 77, 74, 78, 79. I was having to work very hard to keep the pace, but the thing that bothered me most was that I was being beaten mentally by the workout. I found starting after only 30s rests really tough… but I was getting through it.

After a 5:00 rest between sets, we started the next round with Nick. (Interesting sidebar: Nick McBride grew up in Kingston and went to the same highschool as I did: Frontenac – oh, F-A-L… C-O-N-S – and ran with Mr. Grant – I still call teachers Mr.!! – but he was there well after I was – he’s just a young pup, only a couple of years out of Dal – his older sister was in grade 9 when I was in OAC, but the divide between 9 and OAC is continental, so I didn’t know her. We just happened to stumble on our similar backgrounds during a session once – I forgave him for going to Sinclair – it wasn’t his fault). The set started way too fast – 73, and I was already heaving for air after the first interval. The second was better, 76, and the third was going well, but along the backstretch, my calves started to bunch up like fists. We finished with an even 76, but that was it for me. I was finally starting to feel the rhythm, finally starting to get my mentals together, and my calves gave up. Kaput.

I wanted to get back into the set with the boys after a stretch, but every time I put weight into a stride, my calf muscles would cramp up. Like a bird careening at an invisible window, I hit my limit. It sucked.

Cliff mused that the issue concerned my changing mechanics. We’ve been working on my stride mechanics, pushing my weight forward towards the balls of my feet, which might be putting new strains on my calves – but why now, all of a sudden? It may have been that my calves got cold: I was running in shorts and the temperature was dropping in the darkness. Or it may have been that I’ve been training above my capacity and the cracks are starting to appear. This is the interpretation that is really bumming me out. It could be that I would have been fine if I’d been able to run the workout at the proper pace, but it’s hard to tell.

The thing is that because all my speed work with Cliff had been going so well, I was beginning to feel like the sky was the limit with my running. I mean, here I was, joe recreational runner training with national-level guys, and I was hanging in there – the feeling of possibility was really exciting. But there are limits.

Cliff told me repeatedly not to worry about it, that I’ve got time and not to rush things. After all, it was only one workout. But I have this nagging suspicion that I’m not quite as fast as Cliff thinks I am or should be. That’s disappointing too.

So now I’m trying to reassess what to do with last night’s tankage. The feeling of possibility and potential is hard to let go, but I’ve simply got to shake off the workout and get back to business. Improvement doesn’t come all at once – and now that the honeymoon is over, I need to learn patience. I’ll get faster from here, but slowly. Actually, this all puts me in mind of a haiku by the great haiku master Issa:

Snail,
Climb Mt. Fuji –
But slowly, slowly

Part of this whole running thing is discovering my limits, accepting them, and pushing at them slowly. It’s okay that I couldn’t keep up with those boys – they started further up the mountain anyway. This running, this training is my own – one slimy footstep after another. But I’ll get to the top... eventually.

Boredom and Ipods

There’s a question I get sometimes, even from other runners, that always surprises me, and I never know how to answer it properly. The question is this: don’t you get bored on long runs?

Bored? While running?

My answer is always short and unhelpful: no.

I can sort of see where these question askers are coming from. I mean, running is about as repetitive an activity as you can do, especially if the terrain is flat, uninteresting, and all too familiar. And running is often uncomfortable, even at comfortable paces, so I can see how someone could get tired of the mental strain that continuous pain can cause. But I never get bored on runs – even the solitary three hour ones.

Why is that?

I’ve been thinking about this question for awhile, and it was while I was thinking that a thought struck me (oy) – I spend almost all of my time every day alone with my thoughts. And I like it here in my head. I really do. But perhaps other people don’t like to be alone with their thoughts – and if you’re doing a solitary three-hour run, that’s a lot of time to think.

On the few occasions each week when I venture into the outside world (other than for a run), I often observe people going to extremes to avoid being left alone with their thoughts. For example, when I ride the bus, it’s inevitable that the majority of solitary riders are listening to ipods, reading, texting friends, talking on the phone, or even just taking their electronic devices out of their pockets, checking them, putting them back, taking them out again as if they’d forgotten something, putting them back, and on and on.

Is there something wrong with their thoughts? What’s so boring about just sitting and being?

I guess I’m the weird one: I seek out opportunities to just sit and abide and count my exhales. However, while this kind of behaviour – meditating and contemplating – may be weird, it sure is helpful when it comes to doing long runs.

In fact, to me, long runs are a veritable cornucopia of interesting internal and external stimuli. Each kilometre split brings dramatic tension. Every incline and decline forces me to change my stride. Monitoring my body and its changing conditions provides a never-ending flow of data to interpret. Smiling and waving to other runners evokes pleasant emotions. Dodging loose dogs evokes negative ones. And then there are the thoughts – ah, the thoughts – that rise and fall like a symphony.

Where is there an opportunity to get bored?

Other runners I’ve talked to have various coping strategies. The simplest is to run with a group or a running partner. It’s not a failsafe method, though – people can be just as boring as being alone, sometimes more so. But if there is no company to keep, many runners turn to technology, especially ipods.

Now, the use of ipods in running is a bit of a touchy subject, and there are zealots for and against, but I’m a moderate: I don’t train with music; however, I don’t think it’s somehow “impure” to do so. Whatever gets runners out the door each day is fine by me – whatever motivates them over the long haul is good in my books. Sure, there are safety concerns, but I think they are pretty minor all things considered. And the use of ipods has spawned an entire art: designing playlists strategically to meet the needs of a particular run. If you need the theme from Chariots of Fire to keep your legs moving through the final mile of a 20 miler – have at. Combining the emotion of music with the exertion of running can be a potent high. The more endorphins you can inspire, the better.

My own experience of running with music has been quite limited – and, to be honest, it hasn’t been particularly positive. The only time in the last 5 years that I’ve been driven to use music while running was last winter when I was stuck doing all my runs on a treadmill after breaking some ribs (I slipped and fell on ice while running). Doing 2+ hour runs on a treadmill is murder after weeks and weeks on the infernal machine. The only thing worse is pool running.

Now, I don’t own an ipod – actually, I’ve never downloaded a single song – so the best I could do was to bring a CD player into the workout room of my condo building and listen to full CDs. I admit that this is certainly not a good test of the effect of music on running, but I did learn a couple of things from the experience.

For one, running is all about rhythm – finding the right rhythm for a particular workout given the particular condition of your body in the moment. I hadn’t realized it before, but finding and maintaining and tweaking this rhythm requires constant monitoring, constant awareness of your body, your breathing, and your surroundings. Even on a treadmill, I’m always adjusting my running rhythms. As it turns out, music has its own rhythm, and it messes with and sometimes even dictates the rhythm of your legs. Before I figured this out, the clash of rhythms made running with music quite frustrating at times.

I also found that I redirected my normally internally based motivation outwards and started relying on the music to push me through the difficult parts of runs, whether it was the final kilometre of a hard tempo run or the last few seconds of an incline interval or the final minutes of a long run. And if the music wasn’t suitably inspiring, I found that I didn’t have nearly the same motivational strength to push me through the tough stuff. For me, running was much more difficult with music than without.

In the end, I found it much more agreeable to run two hours on a treadmill with no music and no tv. But that’s just me. Go figure.

In my opinion, the more agitated external stimuli we consume, the more intense and frequent our experience of boredom becomes. Running for three hours doesn't have to be boring at all -- it just requires a reassesment of how dramatic a stimulus needs to be to grab our attention. As corny as it sounds, sometimes the sound of shoes crunching on gravel can be music enough. In fact, sometimes it's the silence that's most interesting of all.

2009 Chiba Ekiden

You never know where things might take you. You do what you love, and you see what happens – and sometimes you wind up in Japan. Well, I haven’t ended up in Japan, but a woman I run with is right now somewhere in the stratosphere on her way to Chiba, Japan as part of Canada’s entry into the prestigious invitational road relay that’s been held there since 1988.

Here’s how it happened. Denise was part of Nova Scotia’s Timex series team that ran in the Oasis Zoo Run back in October. This race also served as Athletics Canada’s National 10k Road Race Championships. As I mentioned in a previous blog, Denise was the third woman to cross the line that day. Now, if that wasn’t cool enough – a 41 year old mother of three finishing third in Canada – the race also served as the qualifier for the 2009 Chiba Ekiden team. So for her tremendous effort in the zoo run, Athletics Canada rewarded Denise with a spot on the team. Now she’s pretty much the queen of the roads in Canada – and I run intervals with her!!

So what the heck is this Chiba Ekiden thing? Well, I had no idea either before October. Apparently, though, the Japanese are crazy about running, especially marathon running – and they’ll take their marathon running any way they can get it. For variety, the Ekiden takes the marathon distance and chops it up into 6 stages. These 6 legs are run by teams of women and men; they are distributed thus: 5k men, 5k women, 10k men, 5k women, 10k men, 7.195k women. I assume that, like most other road race relays, each leg has a common start and accumulated time decides the winners. I could be wrong, though.

Now the Japanese don’t fool around when it comes to events like this. In order to create the best event possible, they foot the bill for teams of elite runners from around the world to attend. It’s pretty neat – and next to the Olympics and the World Championships, it’s as world class as it gets.

Each invited country sends a total of 8 runners (4 men and 4 women) – 6 who run and 2 alternates (the alternates run a 5k on the track – no free rides here). Last time I talked to Denise, she hadn’t been told what leg she was running (actually, she was most nervous about being chosen as the alternate because she hasn’t run a track race in spikes in over 2 decades!), but she knew who her teammates were: Marilyn Arsenault, Reid Coolsaet, Malindi Elmore, Megan Metcalfe, Richard Mosley, Steve Osaduik, and Dylan Wykes. That’s a pretty amazing team to be a part of!

The team left for Japan today, and they’ll race the Ekiden on Monday. I can only imagine Denise will have an amazing experience, despite a cold and a nagging hamstring issue, which she jokingly blames me for because it showed up when we were doing intervals two Saturdays ago.

The whole thing is pretty cool, and everyone in Cliff’s group specifically and Run Nova Scotia generally is so proud of her. She’s gone from picking up running recreationally about 6 years ago to becoming the Canadian Masters Marathon record holder, a top-10 finisher at Boston, a Nike-sponsored athlete, and now a member of a national team. As Arthur Lydiard said, “There are champions everywhere” – apparently that includes Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

The Olympic Flame

I just watched the Olympic flame pass by only a few blocks from where I live. To put it bluntly, I was moved. Say what you will about the negative aspects of the Games (and do say them), call me delusional, call me naïve, call me maudlin, call me sentimental, call me corny, call me whatever the heck you want – but I could feel my own Olympic fire smouldering, could feel it find new fuel as I watched the torch’s orange flame dancing and vanishing upwards into a cloudless sky. Ignoring (for a moment) everything that surrounded the torch, from the giant Coke vehicles to the armed police escort, I focused only on that flame, felt only what it has represented to me – an ever-moving energy, a spirit within that strains against limitations, pushes out with a creative force.

I’ve been to the Olympic Museum and the IOC headquarters in Lausanne. I’ve stood beside a statue of Paavo Nurmi and looked out across the shining waters of Lake Geneva to the French Alps beyond. I’ve dreamed the Olympic dream as the sun set behind the French hills – not for love of fame or power or control, but for love of human ideals, which seemed so fragile against the darkening mountains. We project meaning into the world, and sometimes it seems to diffuse like a spotlight splaying into the night sky. But our meaning has the power to move us, and the meaning of the Olympics – faster, higher, stronger – has the power to move us beyond what we thought was possible. Yes, it makes some cheat and makes others roll their eyes in disdain, but against all that, I hold fast to a belief that its ideals have done some good and that they still hold valuable potential.

I’m glad the torch passed by on a Wednesday, a day when I meet Cliff and the others at the track for some hard speed work. I can carry this over-wrought enthusiasm onto the track and let it push me in my quest to become faster and stronger. I’ll never run in the Olympics, but I’ve got my own Olympic goals and dreams that invest my training with meaning. And that faith that what I do in training has some kind of meaning spills over into all aspects of my life. Against an ever-looming empty darkness, I try to keep my own Olympic flame lit. It would be easy to lay down in the darkness and sleep this life away, but I think it’s way more fun to chase the flame up the mountainside.

Here’s to sport – one of the best things we do as a species.

Addicted to the Lightning

Burn hot – fizzle fast. That pretty much sums up one of my major training and racing weaknesses. I go out like a shot… then I fade… and fade… and… fade. I’m not alone in this habit: many runners are addicted to the lightning. In fact, it’s an ancient tradition. Even goode olde Socrates knew about the phenomenon. Take a look at this passage in Book X of The Republic – it sounds eerily familiar:

Do not clever but unjust men act like runners who run well for the first part of the course, but not for the second part? At first they leap away sharply, but they become ridiculous by the end with their ears sunk into their shoulders and they leave the track without being crowned, whereas true runners get to the end, take the prizes, and are crowned. (613b-c)

So even back in the day, guys were giv’n’er way too hard doing intervals around the Parthenon – makes me feel a bit better… although the suggestion that runners who fizzle and “clever but unjust men” act similarly makes me bristle. Well, at least he only says that the unjust “act like” fizzly runners – fortunately it does not follow logically that “ridiculous” runners are unjust… just stupid.

You’d think that after years of going out too fast in speed work, long runs, and races, I’d freakin’ learn to slow down. But no. It feels so good to go fast with fresh legs… even though no long-term good has ever come of it.

Ridding me of this addiction has become one of Cliff’s (my coach’s) projects. He wants me not only to understand intellectually and theoretically that an even pace is superior in interval training and racing, but he also wants me to experience this truth viscerally – right in the guts. And he did just that this past Saturday.

Here’s how it went down. The football dudes were occupying the track at SMU, so we headed to Point Pleasant Park to get our workout in. Cliff paired me up with a great guy named Alexander and laid out what he wanted: 3 x 1 mile intervals at Threshold pace – 5:45/mi – with short rests and 2 x 1 kilometre repeats at VO2 max pace – 3:20/km. Now, for Alexander, who used to run for Windsor back in the 90s when they regularly won CIS cross country, this workout was a piece of cake. But for me, this was stretching things a little.

Regardless, I was up for the challenge. Hey, why not? If Cliff says I can do it – I can do it. So off we went.

The way interval training works in Point Pleasant is that Cliff stands at a certain trail intersection (I like to call it Cliff’s corner) while his runners go madly off in all directions. As we run, he stands there, holding three or four watches to keep track of each group’s splits. It’s crazy. What’s neat is that there’s this one loop that, by some supernatural grace, is pretty much exactly 800m. So for our mile repeats, we simply do two loops… this gives Cliff a chance to yell at us to slow down if we cross 800m too fast.

And it’s inevitable that we go too fast. For example, in our first interval, Alexander and I crossed the 400m mark in 76s – we were supposed to be on an 86s pace. Not wanting to disappoint Cliff, we reined it in, but we still crossed 800m way too fast. “That’s a bit fast guys,” Cliff said quietly as we passed. I winced with shame. We waved our apologies and ran the second half pretty much how we were supposed to. Actually, after that second loop, our legs got a feel for the pace, and we were pretty much right on for the second two mile intervals.

However, Cliff’s style is always to change things up – and he likes to throw in different paces in the same workout to keep our legs guessing. On our first VO2 max kilometre interval, we tried to guess the right pace… but we were way off. We were supposed to be on a 2:40 800m pace, but we crossed somewhere in the low 2:30s… I’m not sure what it was – I didn’t look at my watch because I was trying like hell to keep up with Alexander who had way more gas in the tank than I did. Cliff was not impressed.

He urged us to slow down for the last interval, but this one was even worse. We crossed 400m in 72s – we were supposed to cross in 80s. My legs filled up with lactic acid, and I struggled just like Socrates’ unjust man for the last 600m. I had no clever quip when Cliff asked how I was through 800m. It was obvious I wasn’t okay at all. A VO2 max interval is not supposed to hurt like that – I was screwing up the workout.

After the workout, we were chatting about pace. I told Cliff that I thought maybe the workout was a bit too fast for me, at least the VO2 max stuff. My last interval was 3:16, but I struggled for it. “The 3:20 pace isn’t the problem,” Cliff replied. “It’s your pacing.” I frowned in disbelief. “No. No. Look,” he said (Cliff’s always saying this). “You went out too fast, but if you relax and pace evenly, you can run 3:20 no problem.” I looked sceptical and continued stretching. This is where things took a turn.

“Come here,” Cliff said. I looked over. “You’re going to run another one.”

“What?” I looked at the other runners who were finished – they all looked puzzled.

“Yeah. Do one more. But this time run relaxed. Don’t go crazy.”

“But…”

“No. You can handle it.”

I was a bit shocked, but I lined up for another interval. What the heck, right? As I was about to take off, though, Cliff interrupted me.

“Wait a second. Give me your watch.”

“What?” I felt naked without my watch, but I gave it to him.

Then he spoke to me very quietly, almost a whisper. “Just relax. Go.”

I could hear him start his stopwatch as I went. I tried to relax. Every time I felt that lactic acid pain in my gut, I backed off and relaxed. I crossed 400m and had no idea how fast or slow I was going. But I kept his voice in my head. Relax. Focus on your form. As I neared the 800m mark, Cliff started reading out the times: “2:38, 2:39, 2:40.” I crossed 800m in 2:40… exactly on pace for a 3:20km. “Stop!” he yelled, figuring 800m was enough to drive his point home. It was.

As I wandered towards him with a stunned look on my face, he smiled. “How did that feel?”

“Way better than the last two.” I was running about the same overall pace as the last two, but this one felt easier, much easier.

He nodded. He could see by my face that I got it. I could run a comfortable 3:20km, even after 7km of fast running. All it took was relaxed, even pacing. In one dramatic pedagogical decision, he’d both made his point about pacing and given me new confidence.

It was awesome.

I doubt my addiction to the lightning is cured. But I won’t soon forget all of Cliff’s dramatic efforts to get me to quit.

Beyond the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

The grassy slopes of Citadel Hill still dominate the heart of old Halifax. The hill is a glacial deposit left by unimaginably thick ice sheets that pushed through here thousands of years ago. Like many drumlins, the hill is shaped somewhat like a teardrop. Towards the northwest, there is a road that gently descends the length of the teardrop’s tail to its tip, where it meets the intersection of Ahern Av. and Rainnie Dr. The road is a favourite of runners looking to strengthen their quads with some hill work. It’s not quite long enough for effective hill repeats – it’s not even 200m to the top – but it still serves as a nice challenge, rewarding breath-heavy runners with views of the harbour and an expansive feeling of towering over the city.

For me, though, this road is less interesting as a place to run (I shun city streets for wooded trails whenever possible) and more interesting as a place where runners seem to ascend into the sky along the knife edge of the world. To see what I mean, you need to walk north along Ahern. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch sight of a lone runner toiling up the road as billows of fog swirl like dragon’s breath in the nothingness behind. Even on a sunny day, the sight of a runner on that road always stirs my spirit. With no land and no buildings visible behind, she looks like the loneliest and bravest person in the world.

This loneliness – the solitary runner moving like a shadow against the sky – is part of the romance of running. I’m reminded here of a passage from Alan Sillitoe’s story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” where the main character, identified only vaguely as Smith, describes his own keen sense of loneliness:

When on a raw and frosty morning I get up at five o’clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor and all the rest still have another hour to snooze before the bells go, I slink downstairs through all the corridors to the big outside door… I feel like the first and last man on the world, both at once, if you can believe what I’m trying to say.

And that’s what a runner on Citadel Hill look like to me: the first and last person on earth. Her silhouette evokes a mixture of possibility and sadness – the bitter-sweet contradiction of solitude.

On my own solitary runs through the forests of the Shubenacadie, I expand into this loneliness. There, I’m not boxed in by expectations or responsibilities, so once I’ve outrun the superficial worries of the day, I’m free to explore the open ground (inside and out) that reveals itself only in isolation. On the trail, there is little that I need to respond to, little that calls forth the tight masks we put on and take off in social encounters. There is room to move, to breathe, to transform.

Although I’m often alone on the trail, I know I’m not alone in seeking the boons of solitude through running. I’ve talked to runners who view their running as a contemplative practice – a chance to schedule time away from the daily grind in order to pursue meaningful and pleasurable thoughts that would otherwise remain unexplored, buried under layers of everyday concerns. I’ve talked with other runners who view their running as a kind of therapy – something about being alone and moving rhythmically through space returns them to emotional equilibrium. And I’ve talked with runners who view getting out onto the trails as a chance to commune with nature, a chance to escape the narrow logic of asphalt and concrete grids, the reduced geometry of rectangular buildings and squared angles, the constant bombardment of information and marketing: text and imagery that over-stimulate only a tiny portion of the soul.

I too have felt the contemplative and therapeutic possibilities of running, but it’s the idea of communing with nature that has captivated me recently. Taken literally, the verb commune refers to the act of talking intimately with someone. The image that first comes to my mind is of lovers seated facing each other – eyes locked, hands intertwined, soft words exchanged in hushed tones. Communing is a special kind of communication that engages more of someone’s being than a passing hello on the street or even an evening debrief of the day’s events between spouses. Communing denotes a heightened state of mindful awareness in which a more robust and satisfying exchange can occur between self and other. Communing opens you up to the subjectivity of the other – maybe it even overcomes the loneliness of selfhood for a moment.

So what’s all that fancy talk got to do with running in nature? What does it mean to commune with nature? I can assure you that it doesn’t mean that I sit facing a tree with my hands intertwined in its roots, cooing soft words to the squirrels as they chatter angrily and drop acorns on my head. What I mean by communing with nature is, first, simply becoming more aware and mindful of the forest as I move through it: noticing the sparkle of sun on the lake beyond the bright birches, the first ladyslipper to bloom between kilometres 6 and 7, the “here, sweety” song of a chickadee on the make.

From within this mindful state, I look and feel for my intimate connections to the natural world – the nonverbal ways in which we communicate. It might be helpful here to know that the words commune and communicate both come from the same Latin root communis, which means “common.” Communing, then, is just this search for commonalities – and when it comes to nature, it means rediscovering our connections with the larger world.

You might be wondering, though, what exactly I mean by communicating with nature. After all, nature doesn’t use symbolic language (at least that we can understand) and it doesn’t really take much notice of us, except for the small animals who run away. On one level, what I mean by communication is simply taking notice of the exchanges that are always going on: the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide as we breathe, the exchange of force as our running shoes push against the ground and the ground pushes back, the exchange of hot and cold and moisture between our bodies and the air, and so forth.

As I run, I try to recognize all the physical conditions necessary for my running to occur: air, ground, friction, gravity, light, warmth, and so on. Without these conditions, there would be no running. And – if you’ll forgive yet another venture into etymology – the word condition, which I’m here using to mean “anything on which something else depends; that without which something else cannot occur or exist,” comes from the Latin com- “together” + dicere “say” – conditions, then, are elements that speak together or commune in order to produce a result. The way I see it, when “I” run, it’s not just about some lonely guy going out for an early-morning jog. No way. Running is much more than that – running is air, ground, friction, gravity, light, warmth, and me all saying “run” together – and each stride through the forest awakens new voices into the commune.

It’s a bit paradoxical, but the loneliness of the solitary long distance runner has, for me at least, led me into a deeper sense of connection with the larger world. In fact, I find I feel much lonelier when engaged in the superficial social exchanges that dominate most working days. In the forest, though, that feeling of being an independent person engaged with other independent people dissolves along the edges when I feel with each breath and each stride the host of conditions on which my running – and my existence – depends.

For me, then, communing with nature means becoming aware of conditionality, of the way that any action or thing is a saying-together of everything else. It means listening to me and everything else commune each other into existence at every moment. It means feeling my wovenness, my embeddedness, my common connection with the world around and through me – it means glimpsing the kind of consciousness that can hold all these threads together at once.

The sight of the lonely runner ascending Citadel Hill is no less stirring for me, even if I don’t think she is ever really alone. As she teeters on what looks like the edge of the earth, I rest assured in the feeling that she can never really fall into the abyss beyond because there is no space outside this world – she is held safe within the intimate communion of a conditional universe.

The Madness of PB Pursuit

[Note: I wrote this little piece back in August 2006. My post from yesterday put me in mind of it because it also deals with the idea of dependence. FYI: I set my current 5k PB at Lunenburg in 2008.]


I recently broke my 5km PB at a race in Digby, Nova Scotia. There, on the shores of the best scallop fishing grounds in the world, I bettered a personal record that had dogged me for over a year. But the experience was not altogether positive. As I crossed the finish line and glanced up at the clock, I didn’t feel elated as one might expect; instead, I simply felt relieved. Is this the price of running for PBs?

To most runners, a year is not such a long time to carry the same PB. I’ve talked to runners who haven’t smashed a PB in years – and it doesn’t bother them one bit. But I’m a new runner – just a rookie – and (realistically or not) I expect to improve a little with each race.

You see, my first ever 5k (June 2005) turned out to be my fastest 5k until Digby (August 2006). Race after race, I just couldn’t seem to match my first effort. Sometimes it was weather – never-ending East-coast wind and rain; sometimes it was terrain – steep hills are practically unavoidable here in Nova Scotia; and sometimes it was my own silly fault – shoelaces coming undone or a few too many pints the night before! But blaming those conditions felt a bit too easy. I worried that I had peaked in my first race – that I, like some forgettable 80s pop act, was a “one-hit wonder.”

In my frustration, I did what any stupid rookie would do: I trained harder. It’s no surprise that somewhere on the track that I was using for punishing interval sessions, I dropped and lost the simple joy of running and racing. In fact, during races, I spent more time looking at my watch than at the road. And the result was frustrating – I would burn hot and fizzle fast. My legs just couldn’t do what I was screaming at them to do.

So I gave up.

No, I didn’t give up running altogether; instead, I gave up my driving obsession with PBs. For a month before Digby, I trained easier, went to the track less. I ran most runs comfortably and sought out beautiful lakeside and oceanside trails. I rediscovered the joy of breath after breath, stride after stride goalless running.

And guess what? I finally broke my PB… by 11 seconds. And I didn’t look at my watch once during the race!

Now, I can’t say here that I suddenly became some kind of Zenned-out guru runner floating on clouds of bliss. Like I said at the start of this piece, my sense of relief crowded out the simple joy I might otherwise have felt after the race. PBs still mattered a lot to me. Nor can I say that the best way to a PB is to train less – it was most likely a combination of hard and easy training that precipitated that run. And to mar any clear lessons further, the PB could simply have been the result of a lucky combination of conditions: the day was cool but not cold, the wind was absent, and the course was net downhill.

So what is a poor rookie to think?

Actually, I’m of two minds about PBs now. On the one hand, nothing motivates my will to train more than trying to score a PB at an important race. On the track, when my lungs are searing in their own blood, my quads turning into sludge, and my bowels filling with lactic acid, sometimes the only thought keeping me from quitting, the only thought chasing me around the track for one more repeat is the desire for a PB. In fact, PBs provide a kind of end goal that seems to give meaning to all the weeks of hard training leading up to a race. I run because I want to improve my times. Makes sense. Otherwise, running might simply become an aerobic form of sadism! The quest for PBs keeps us runners noble and sane (we hope).

On the other hand, PBs are a bit of a sham. The assumption underlying my PB mania is that any two races of the same distance are comparable. I assume that the time I run in, say, the Lunenburg World Heritage 5k is meaningfully comparable to the time I run in the Digby Scallop Festival 5k. They are, after all, both advertised as 5km road races.

But the similarities between the two courses pretty much end at advertised length. Both have hills, but Digby is more forgiving because it has a long, gentle downhill to ease the pain of the one major uphill on the double-loop course. Lunenburg wrenches you up and plummets you down as you pass over the ends of the drumlin on which the town is built. No wonder I ran a better time at Digby!

The problem with comparing race times is that you can never separate the times from the particular conditions of race day – we run enmeshed within the racing environment. For example, the second 5k I ever raced was in Enfield, Nova Scotia. I was feeling good, my training indicated that I was running faster than ever, but the day was pure misery: cold driving winds swirled along the unsheltered road – rain was soaking racers to the bone and running shoes to the sole even before the gun went off. No wonder I ran a better time at Digby!

Running performance is so dependent on conditions, and conditions are so fleeting and particular, that it is impossible to compare race times without ignoring all the unique external factors that shaped each race. Relative to the conditions, my Enfield time may actually have been better than my Digby time. In fact, at Enfield, I finished ahead of a few runners who normally beat me, some of whom beat me at the Digby race. But Digby is my PB simply because the numbers on the finish-line clock were lower.

Unless you want to race only on treadmills in climate-controlled rooms, you’re stuck with a series of times that don’t stack up flush against each other. Since race times lose much of their meaning when abstracted from race conditions, using PBs as inspiration for training seems silly – and potentially frustrating. Too much of a PB performance is beyond control – you can train weeks for a goal race, only to run slowly because of cruddy conditions. In the end, how proud can I feel of a race time that is as much due to the course terrain and the weather as my own training and race strategy?

After Digby, I’ve tempered my obsession with PBs, but I haven’t let go of it entirely. I still think pursuing PBs is a fun way of giving my training direction. Deep-winter treadmill runs would surely break me if I didn’t once in a while slip into a daydream about surging past the line in personal record time. PB pursuit seems healthy to me, as long as I remain aware of the dependence of race times on race conditions. That way, I won’t get too frustrated after a slower race and, even more importantly, won’t get too proud after a fast one.

After all, there’s more to this running gig than simply shaving seconds off of past performances… right?

Running Humbly

A memory fell into mind during my run today – like an old pressed flower falling from between the pages of a book pulled off the shelf by chance. It came, of all places, from my last year of high school, the one year I ran track. The memory goes like this: I was running the third leg of the 4x400m relay in the County meet. When I received the baton (I can’t remember who from – seems the flower has lost a petal or two), we were in third place. I took off, hungry to overtake the guys in front. With each stride, I was able to cut the distance, and by the time I rounded the final turn, I was only a couple of metres behind. My legs were practically numb, filled to the brim with lactic acid, but I pushed on, buoyed by the roar of the crowd. In the final 100m, I caught and passed the guy in second. It was exhilarating.

In a more heroic story, I would have caught the guy in first. Alas, it didn’t happen. I handed off the baton to our anchor, but he was unable to catch the team in front. We finished second. But, boy, it’s hard to express how sweet that feeling was of bridging a big gap, of reeling a guy in and leaving him to flop like a fish in the dry dust. Awesome.

“Reeling him in” – what a perfect metaphor for the act of catching and passing a runner. I’m not much of an angler, but I’ve caught a few fish – I’ve felt the sudden tug, seen beads of water spring off a line gone taut, the red bobber disappear under the calm surface of a cove. I’ve thrilled with the challenge of landing a fish amid the whirring whine of playing line and the methodical clicking of the reel.

In both running and fishing, the act of reeling narrows your attention to a knife edge, and the desire to catch consumes your entire being. Mind and body act in unison with a frightening singularity of purpose. I imagine hunting is somewhat the same.

I’m not sure how far you can stretch the “reeling in” metaphor before the connection between vehicle and tenor (the two parts of a metaphor) snaps like a wishbone, but it seems as if we human beings are well-suited to competition, both on the track and in the eat or be eaten game of nature red in tooth and claw. There is pleasure in the chase, satisfaction in the kill.

On the track those many years ago, I keenly felt that satisfaction. It’s a heady feeling – one of the great pleasures of sport. I felt it many times competing in volleyball (where “kill” is the appropriately used term for ramming the ball onto the opposing team’s floor to score a point) and in soccer. But at the tender and immature age of a high schooler, when I was still in the midst of discovering just who the hell I was, this feeling of satisfaction inevitably got warped into pride, a feeling of superiority. After all, when you compete and win, it feels like a very direct validation of the worth and value of yourself over and above others.

But is this feeling of superiority inevitably bound up in the feeling of satisfaction that comes at the successful termination of a chase? I’m not sure that it is. For example, the oft-told story about First Nations hunting culture is that the satisfaction a hunter feels after a successful hunt flows from a sense of humility and gratitude, not of superiority – the animal has generously and willingly given itself, so there’s no place for feelings of pride, especially given that future game may shun boastful hunters. It’s impossible to control the outcome of a day’s hunting, and a single success does not wipe out the memory of many failures.

Now, I’m not sure how accurate that little anecdote is, but it does express an important idea, I think: competition is a chancy affair – winning and losing (living and dying) are precarious things. Perhaps in sport it’s absurd to think of a vanquished competitor as willingly losing (like the Native hunter’s dying deer), but that doesn’t mean superiority is an appropriate or even reasonable response to winning.

The catch is dependence. In fact, dependence is always the catch when it comes to the self’s attempt to scratch out its independence in this world. Winning (like catching fish or hunting game) always depends on many many factors beyond individual control, factors you likely aren’t ever aware of: from weather to footware to what the other guy’s mom said that morning to what’s in your belly.

I have no idea what factors came together that day on the track years ago – no idea what the conditions were that allowed me to reel that guy in. But I bet it was more than “I was better than that guy.” To reduce any situation to that level of simplicity is just foolish. What I should’ve felt was gratitude that things went the way they did; they could’ve easily gone differently. My feeling of superiority was absurd – like one member of a team taking all the credit for a win.

Humility and an insight into dependence go hand-in-hand, I think. It’s one of those things I’ve learned the hard way over the years. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes there’s nothing you could’ve done to change the outcome one way or another. It all depends – so there’s no use getting all hung up on winning and on craving feelings of superiority.

Running has been a real help in making life a bit easier on me in this regard – it has taught me just how much I tend to rely (indirectly and unconsciously) on feelings of superiority to buoy my sense of self-worth… and how counterproductive that is. Even in absurd ways, I often crave some sense of superiority. For example, it used to be that on easy runs and recovery runs, I would abandon my slow pace if a runner was in front of me or catching me up from behind. It was so stupid. On almost every run, I would inevitably end up running too fast, either unable to allow another runner to reel me in or caught up in the desire to reel another runner in. It didn’t matter that while I was doing a slow recovery run, the other runner might’ve been doing some hard threshold work – I still needed to be ahead.

I’d never thought of myself as type-A, but running showed me that part of me certainly was. However, like all nasty bits of self-knowledge that don’t square with my ideal picture of myself, I unconsciously denied the truth failed run after failed run. The compelling thing about running, though, is that the truth often manifests itself physically over time. In this case, my arrogance led to overtraining which contributed to poor racing and eventually to injury. In the long run, I had to face my problem of overtraining – I had to figure out why I was running too fast when I should’ve been running slowly in order to recover from hard workouts. The irony was that my desire to be faster than everyone on the road was having the opposite result – I was getting slower because I kept getting hurt.

It’s been a long battle, but I’ve made some good progress. Like today, during my 8km recovery run, I met a runner who was running faster than I was. Watching the cloth of his shirt ripple across his back with each arm swing somehow triggered the memory of my 4x400 antics of yore. But I didn’t change my pace to reel him in. I wanted to. Man, I wanted to wheel and eat that guy alive. But I didn’t. I stuck to my run and made my peace with it.

Not perfect – but it’s a start.

The funny thing about all this is that I’m not even that fast. That’s another nice thing about running’s ability to foster humility: there’s always someone faster. If your only running focus were beating other guys, you’d go crazy very quickly. With running, there’s no way to hide from the truth of race times – you can’t fake the numbers, so you can’t really lie to yourself about runners with faster numbers. I’ve discovered that any pretensions and self-deceptions get eaten up quickly on the road. The hot asphalt can be painfully purifying.

I’m finding, then, that as I mature, I run with more humility. This humility, however, does nothing to diminish the satisfaction of reeling a runner in – it just clears away some of the crap from the experience. In fact, when I finally passed the last guy in front of me during the Valley Harvest Half Marathon this year, I didn’t feel superior to him; rather, I felt grateful that he’d gone out so bravely (or rashly) so that I could have the added pleasure of reeling him in and winning the race. It made it sweeter than if I’d led the whole way. But I try to keep in mind that on a different day, the race could’ve turned out differently.

Ironically, I suspect that my ongoing battle with foolish pride helped me to run faster that day by keeping my training in check. What this means is that if I’m to keep winning, I’ll need all the humility I can get my greedy little hands on. Humility gets results.

Wait. Did I just miss the point?

Boy, Do I Ever Ramble Sometimes

Warning: This entry goes on way too long and gets a bit too academic-y near the end. Just thought you should know. My apologies in advance.


There’s this great little pizza joint just down the street from where my wife and I live. On first sight, it looks pretty much like any other neighbourhood pizza place. It’s in a non-descript grey boxy building with one of those standard plastic signs over the door lit from behind with long fluorescent bulbs. Inside there are a few tables and chairs scattered around, but you can tell that it’s mainly a take-out place. There’s a big L-shaped counter that dominates the space, and there’s a big oven in the corner, right next to the deep fryer.

Tired of paying for delivery from chain pizza places, Julie-Ann and I eventually decided to try this place – The Hungry Hut – just to see. The pizza was great: their “works” pizza rivals any I’ve had. Since then, we’ve always ordered our pizza from them for pick-up. As a result, the folks who own and run the place have gotten to recognize me, both in person and on the phone. We have great little chats, and every time I walk past the storefront, they always give a wave. It’s a real community pizza place with lovely owners – the kind of place I’d keep going to even if something cheaper opened up next door.

The last time I was in there, the guy who owns the joint asked me about running. He and his wife always see me running past the store, and they were wondering how often I run. Pretty much every day, I told them. The guy shook his head – non-runners always seem struck either with amazement or suspicion (or both) when they find out how much we runners actually run. He asked how long I run. It varies, I told him, depending on the purpose of the day’s run, but my longest is generally around 3 hours. His eyes widened a bit, and his wife (who’d just joined the conversation) congratulated me on all the running. At this point, they both lamented about how they should do a bit of running and how they’ve done a bit in the past but not kept it up. And they both related traumatic tales from their childhoods about running in gym class (I think that tale is pretty much universal).

I wasn’t sure if they were serious when they expressed interest in running, but I tried to impart some beginner’s wisdom nonetheless. I told them a bit about my own story: how I was overweight and couldn’t run for more than 15 minutes at a time when I started. I told them that most people try to do too much when they begin – that’s one of the major reasons why so many don’t keep up with it. The best approach is to listen to your body and not expect too much. Even if you can only run a minute or less at a time, you have to start with what you have and then build slowly, methodically, and persistently.

I imagine that neither will take up running, that they were simply being polite – and that’s fine. But the conversation got me thinking about just how trainable and adaptable the human body really is. In fact, the guy who owns the Hut has had some experience with this: he lifts weights and has the pipes to show for it. Weightlifting is all about slow, methodical progression – there’s no other way to transform (for example) your biceps from skinny little wires that tremble curling 5 lbs to hulking pythons that can curl a small bus. The metamorphoses that training can produce are darn near miraculous.

My own experience with metamorphosis has been fascinating. I’ve dissolved pounds, made inches vanish – I look and feel different from how I looked and felt 6 years ago. There are large parts of “me” that no longer exist – I am not the same. Through a progressive and disciplined training program my body has gained the capacity to move much more quickly through the gravitational pull of space and time. My muscles have changed, my cells have changed, my metabolism has changed – even my cardiovascular system has changed. My heart beats significantly slower; I breathe more deeply into clearer lungs.

The human body is malleable. Certainly, the possibilities are not endless – there are limits to how much we can change. But those limits are much wider than we generally think. The only way to test them, though, is through disciplined training.

These kinds of thoughts about training were rolling around my mind as I was leaving the pizza place with a medium works. Walking home, I found myself contemplating the relationship between training and other aspects of my life. In acquiring any skill, we generally recognize the importance of training. The workers converting the old Greenvale School into loft apartments across the street needed to be trained in carpentry, masonry, and so forth in order to do the job. The same goes for the intellect. All of my university training exercised that part of my mind – the part that reads and writes and thinks critically.

For almost every aspect of life, we go through a disciplined progression of training – we don’t assume that things will simply come “naturally.” But it struck me that there is one glaring area where we do not extend this wisdom about training – moral behaviour.

I guess I shouldn’t use the collective “we” in this discussion because I don’t actually know about everyone else, but I can say from my own experience that I’ve never really practiced doing “good” things. In school, in Sunday school, in books, in parental admonitions, I’ve learned the cultural norms about right and wrong – but this is simply training the intellect, and it would be naive to believe that the intellect is fully in control of behaviour… or that it even should be. As a kid, getting in trouble was one way of learning what the boundaries between good and bad behaviour were – but this is not the same as actively practicing doing good things. I was given the rules; I was shown the consequences of breaking them; but the rest was left to chance and nature. It was as if someone showed me how to run and then expected me to race at the peak of my potential the very same day.

Perhaps my running and training analogy is a false one – perhaps people are simply born with a tendency towards “bad” or “good” behaviour or born into a set of circumstances that leans them one way or another. But what if moral behaviour is trainable, what if it’s something you have to work at persistently?

I know, I know – this is all a little more complicated than I’m making it out to be. Perhaps these issues are a bit too broad for a blog entry. I mean, I’m whimsically ignoring questions like what is and is not “good” behaviour and who gets to decide what good and bad really are anyway? Oh well… not everything has to be decided today in this blog.

I guess what I’m wondering is why we don’t train for things like generosity or compassion or kindness or patience or tolerance – types of behaviour that are pretty much universally accepted as “good.” For example, “by nature” I’m not a particularly generous person, but I value generosity. There is a disconnect between my intellectual understanding of morality and my actual behaviour. So how do I mend that disconnect? Simply resolving in my mind to be more generous has yielded no fruit. I tell myself to be more generous, and I agree with myself wholeheartedly, but nothing changes. If this were a running problem – like I want to run 10k in under 36 minutes – I would never simply tell myself to run faster. I would back the desire with training. But is there such a thing as generosity training?

I suspect there is. In fact, I imagine most religions outline some kind of behavioural training, although I never really experienced that when I went to Church – I was given the rules but no training program. However, in my reading about Buddhism, I’ve discovered that many Buddhist monastic traditions are all about training. They (and I’m grossly oversimplifying here, of course) do not assume that the mind and body are already prepared for the enlightenment experience; rather, they develop long-term training programs to strengthen the body, settle the mind, and develop what they’ve traditionally defined as morally good behaviours. What Buddhists have recognized is that being “good” isn’t something you do just because – rather, being good helps to create the physical, emotional, and mental conditions required for enlightenment – and it takes practice. For example, the disciplined practice of selfless giving and all the experiences it evokes is preparatory for both giver and receiver on their paths to enlightenment. What this means is that Buddhist monks are trained to act like enlightened beings on their way to actually becoming enlightened beings. To me, this all sounds like progressive training – to me, Buddhist teachers sound a lot like coaches.

The image of behavioural change that I’m more used to is what might be called the “sudden” or “dramatic” change. Take Ebenezer Scrooge for example. His selfish, mean-spirited, narrow-minded, hard-hearted, miserly ways magically vanish into the cold Christmas air after just one night and three visitations. His moral conversion hangs simply on his sudden intellectual and emotional realization that not only will he die miserable and alone but that he is, in fact, an ass. Pop. That’s all it takes for his heart to melt with sympathy and for the good behaviours to flow.

The academic in me wonders if this idea comes from the notion of spiritual conversion or new birth that was first made popular in 17th- and 18th-century Protestant movements such as Puritanism, Methodism, and Baptism. Simply put, in these traditions, you go through a period of morbid introspection where you become aware not only of your mortality but of your unavoidably sinful state. The key here is anxiety: you’re going to die and there’s no way to avoid the fires of hell… unless. But the way out is not to see a spiritual coach and draw up a training schedule to amend bad behaviours. No way – your inherently sinful nature makes this route pointless. Rather, at some point, your anxiety reaches a kind of tipping point when you realize your utter dependence on the saving power of Jesus and throw yourself on his mercy. If you're one of the lucky ones, your anxiety will suddenly flow away under the cooling waters of redemptive grace (more or less). Pop. You’re saved and your behaviour will automatically change.

This may be a long stretch, but it seems to me that this pattern of sudden conversion is the same kind of pattern common to sit coms and popular dramas on TV. Someone’s acting like an ass – they don’t know why – over the course of the show, the source of the ass-like behaviour is revealed – and all is resolved. It’s like a mini conversion: all that’s required is some kind of psychoanalytic-like penetrating insight and the rest will follow naturally.

But does it really? How often has a sudden epiphany resulted in long-term behavioural change? I really can’t say. I’m sure it does sometimes, but I’ve revealed to other people all sorts of penetrating insights about themselves… and it never goes like it does on TV. Funny that.

Basically, the idea I’m batting around here is that body and mind and behaviour are all malleable and trainable – and perhaps the best tool for change is training. If you want to become faster, you train to become faster. If you want to become smarter, you train to become smarter. But for some reason, this logic doesn’t always get extended into the realm of moral behaviour. And part of me agrees – it does seem a little inauthentic to practice goodness – but how else are we to become “better” people?

Boy, this blog really went much further than I’d intended. I’m a long way from the pizza joint and I’m not sure how to tie it all together. Oh well, like running on a new trail, I just wanted to see where these reflections were going. My hope is that these thoughts will inspire me to undertake some disciplined training when it comes to good behaviour – I won’t hold my breath, though. It’s easy to think about, but who actually wants to do it??

Running Blog Rhetoric

You know, blogging is a pretty interesting rhetorical exercise. Perhaps I’m overly self-conscious about all this; perhaps I analyze things a bit too much; perhaps normal people don’t use the word perhaps quite so much – but it’s been an interesting struggle to find an appropriate voice (or ethos) to suit the blogging environment. I have a feeling that most bloggers don’t pay much attention to this sort of thing – they just write, just say what they want to say, and the results are great. But I don’t feel like I have a singular voice or even a default voice – for me, tone is a conscious choice.

In fact, part of the reason I wanted to start blogging was to explore different writing voices and to find a more honest and less formal voice. My problem is that I spent well over a decade doing undergraduate and graduate degrees in English Lit. This is partly a blessing because I got a lot of practice writing and thinking and following clear lines of argument like highway lines in the night. But it was also partly a curse: much of the writing I did was rigid and formal. Over time, that structured formality became my voice. There have always been other voices in me waiting to speak (no, I don’t “hear voices”), but I never gave them a chance.

It seems to me, though, that the academic voice, while great for expository essays, doesn’t really fit with the ethos of the blogosphere – it’s as uncomfortable as showing up in a suit and tie to a surfer beach party: you can do it, and it’s okay, but you might be more comfortable in something a little less formal.

So each time I sit down to write a blog entry, I worry about voice. Part of the problem is that I don’t have a clear idea of audience – and if you don’t know who you’re writing to, then it’s difficult to settle into your writing self. Just as the tone you adopt when you talk to your friends is different from the tone you use with a stranger on the street, writing tone changes with audience. So who am I talking to in this blog? Is it friends and family, other runners, the general public? Each choice would make me write differently.

Part of me (the part that is sick of things like rhetorical theory) wants nothing to do with all of this analyzing – part of me just wants to write honestly and straightforwardly, without pretence, without scheming – to write long uninhibited honest sentences that unfold without hesitation across the empty potential of the screen like the sentences Kerouac wrote while criss-crossing the continent in the sad American night. But what’s so “honest” about that? Isn’t that just another writer’s mask? Mask after mask – is there anything but masks?

Wouldn’t it be crazy if qualities like “honesty” and “straightforwardness” and “candor” in writing were nothing more than rhetorical devices? Maybe there’s no essential self to find underneath all those masks, just various patterns of speech and behaviour. Hmmm. I’m not sure I want to think about that right now.

One of the things I love about some other running blogs is that they seem so unselfconscious. Bloggers will post the most mundane and banal things about their running without apology. And why not? After all, most of our lives are made up of the mundane and the everyday – if we can’t find meaning and value in those moments, then the bulk of our lives is just dead air.

It’s kind of like those French still-life paintings you see of bowls of fruit or a kitchen table strewn with crumbs and cheese and a cutting board, all lit with a faded afternoon light. At first, these paintings seem dull – where is the heroic action or the beautiful sweeping landscape or the sublime abstraction? But what they say to me is that the casual, the mundane, the trivial moments of life are infused with a quiet beauty if you take the time to look. Or even if the moments don’t hold any of their own beauty, they have the potential to be perceived as beautiful and meaningful in a subtle way.

So when I read that some runner in Minnesota had a pretty good long run on the weekend but her calves are a bit sore, I don’t click away from the page in disdain – instead, I find myself fascinated with the details. Part of the reason is that I too have had sore calves after certain long runs, so I can relate and sympathize. But that’s not the whole story. To me, that mundane blog detail is a little hint that someone out there is making choices about how best to live day-to-day in this bewildering world. Without all this philosophizing and analyzing and brooding, someone has gone out for a long run and now her calves are sore. It’s wonderful.

For me, though, it would be denying a big part of who I am to ignore all the crazy philosophizing (even if it makes people’s eyes roll). Maybe my writing is a bit stiff and formal and overly self-conscious, but why not? As long as it feels honest, then I’m okay with it. My voice may change over time as my ideas about audience and purpose change, but for now, I’ll just write what I feel like writing and try not to worry too much about it. (I’m lying, of course – I’ll always worry!)

Lark Runners

When I meet people and they find out that I’m a runner, almost invariably they have a story about their sibling / friend / parent / relative / friend of friend or whoever who ran some race as a lark without training and in clown shoes and did incredibly well considering that they didn’t work at it. They tell this story with enthusiasm, focussing on what great athletes their sibling / friend / parent / relative / friend of friend must be in order to run and beat others who have trained so hard. The story sucks – and I always find my plastic smile faltering as they try to get me to validate what a wonderful accomplishment that lark of a run was. Sometimes they include an ode to how fast their sibling / friend / parent / relative / friend of friend would be if they ever deigned to try.

Sometimes I wish I weren’t so polite.

Yes, sure, it’s nice that someone ran a half or a full without the usual investment of training – and yes, it must take a certain level of athleticism to do that – but to me, it’s singularly unimpressive. To me, an athlete is someone who commits to what she's doing, someone who sets challenging goals and then works like stink to achieve them – no matter how fast or slow. Athletes take risks. Someone who tells everyone they haven’t trained a bit and are lacing up their shoes for a race risks virtually nothing. If they don’t finish – well, it’s because they didn’t train. If they finish – whooee what an accomplishment… and look at all those suckers who were slower than I was. And those who finished faster? Well, those losers spend so much time training, of course they were faster. If I trained…

It’s a whole dump truck loaded with garbage.

I know the people telling me these heroic stories are probably just trying to relate; they probably don’t mean to be insulting – but celebrating a half-assed performance is just not something I can stomach. Perhaps the half-assed runner does have potential, but potential don’t mean diddly. One of the beauties of running is working hard to discover just what your potential really is – simply talking about potential and feeling good about it without actually doing it is just… sad. Why is this something to celebrate with a heroic tale?

I like running stories where somebody’s sibling / friend / parent / relative / friend of friend worked for years to qualify for Boston and finally did – like my physiotherapist – not where someone qualified on a lark. Or like my sister-in-law’s sister who trained hard after having a baby with the goal of running a sub-1:40 half – and she did it. Or like a friend here in Halifax who trained hard but missed his marathon goal this weekend after hitting the wall. In these stories there is reward, but there is also risk. All of them run at different paces, but they are all athletes – all runners.

I think the test of a good running tale is what the tale implies about other runners. In the tale of the lark run, the implication is that other runners are chumps for taking running seriously. As a result, the story becomes one of those ego stuffers that puffs one person up by deflating others. But a good running tale, while it usually focuses on only one runner, takes the whole process of setting goals and working to achieve them seriously. This implies that all those others in the race ahead or behind are also engaged in a meaningful pursuit. The story is told with understanding and sympathy. Runners passed in the final kilometres are not perceived as chumps; rather, they’re perceived with a sympathetic “I’ve been there” grimace. A good running tale communicates a sense of camaraderie, a sense of community surrounding individual pursuits – from other runners to the volunteers who make the racing stories possible. A lark runner never even notices the volunteers.

I imagine there will be no end to the triumphant telling of lark runner heroics, and I will probably continue to bite my tongue and smile through each exuberantly told story, but I think I’m going to resolve not to celebrate the “accomplishment” with the person telling the tale – I’ll change the subject instead.

Secretly, though, I hope all those lark runners drop the lark and become runners. I hope they come to realize that running is much more than finishing a race. And if running is not for them, no problem – I just hope they gain more respect for the whole pursuit than their chroniclers seem to have.