Running friendships are strangely intimate. With friends who don’t run, I don’t as a rule know what is going on with their bodies – and I generally don’t ask. But it’s the first thing running friends talk about when they see each other, and we go on and on in great detail. There’s no idle chit chat about the weather or politics or such, it’s all “how’s the calf” or “how’s that Achilles feeling” or “how’s your energy level” – it’s all about tendons and muscles and fascia and joints and fatigue. Even though runners tend to be somewhat cerebral people, with each other, it’s very much about the material. Hell, we even talk about gastrointestinal stuff – I know lots of runners who’ve crapped themselves on a run or in a race and don’t mind telling the tale. From the outside, it must appear strange, but for body-obsessed runners, sharing what’s going on with their bodies is the most interesting thing in the world.
I was thinking about all this while I was on the treadmill today. I decided I felt well enough to start back at it – but slowly. I limited myself to 8k and kept the speed very low – nothing more than a 4:40/k and most of it slower. I spent the entire time monitoring my body closely, scrutinizing how my lungs were feeling, how my throat was feeling, how my overall energy level was doing. Even just getting up to 4:40 pace, I could tell my body was not at 100%, so I pulled back on the effort – I wanted the run to feel effortless. This was not the time to push, even a little.
After some years running, you get to know your body pretty well. It becomes easier and easier to distinguish effort levels and to feel when something is out of line. For example, I find I’m much quicker to notice tensions from stress than I used to be – and this is a very good thing.
But while I was thinking about this funny kind of body obsession I've noted in myself, I couldn't help thinking about something one of my running friends who ran varsity cross country told me, something that isn't funny at all. Apparently, anorexia is fairly common among high school and university track and cross country runners. I must admit, this surprised me. I know how much I have to eat to run 60 miles per week, but some university athletes are training that hard or harder with eating disorders (NY Times article and Cross Country article). From what I’m told, girls passing out during major races is not uncommon – and it’s not just from over-exertion.
The thing is not a lot of people talk about this kind of stuff. The glossy magazines will tell you all about what shoes to buy and what recipes to try, and they’ll delight you with breezy or inspirational anecdotes of personal trial or triumph, but not much is said about the sometimes brutal world of competitive running. I don’t really know enough about it to speak with any authority, but it’s a dialogue that needs to open up. Runners and coaches at all levels need to be made aware of the complexities of eating disorders and just how common they are among runners of all abilities and aspirations. There’s some stuff out there, like a book called Running on Empty by a British runner, but I wonder if it’s enough. I still hear tales of coaches weighing their high school-aged female athletes every week. I hope it’s rare, but it shouldn’t happen at all.
Now, to be clear, my body and running obsessions are nothing like what goes on in an eating disorder. But I do wonder about runners like me who've run to the point of injury. If you injure yourself through an accident, well, that’s one thing – but if you injure yourself due to overtraining, you might argue that it’s a kind of self-harm. The trick for me is to find my obsession threshold: to be able to listen closely to my body so I can train the optimal amount instead of using my mind to lash my body into doing more than it can. I’ve been a slave to the training schedule, a slave to the mileage numbers in the past, but I’m getting much better at knowing how far I can push into discomfort before it becomes injury. I’m getting better at staying on the right side of my obsession threshold.
I’ll have to keep all this in mind as I try to ramp my mileage back up after being sick. This is the time when I could do the most damage – after the worst of the symptoms have disappeared but before the virus is 100% gone. Wish me luck!
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