Winter Toughness

Not Dartmouth -- but might as well be!

The sidewalks are covered in ice. The trails are covered in ice. There are still some running folks braving the bitter cold and poor footing. Not me. I’ve brought my running show inside to the treadmill. After falling on ice during a  run and breaking a rib a few years ago, I’m less inclined to hit the roads after Friction has packed its bags and moved to a timeshare down in Florida for a few months.

I do, however, feel a little guilty when I see those brave souls wrapped in five layers, shuffling along gingerly – it’s a uniquely northern ability to run on ice, and I’ve turned my back on it.  Perhaps I’ve become a bit of a wimp.

But my running has never been part of some “tough guy” self-narrative. I am far from being tough. Well, maybe that’s not true, depending on how you define tough – you could argue that my last week’s workouts (6x1k fast, with 3 of those ks under 3:20; 7 miles at 6:00/mile pace on the treadmill; and 21k on the treadmill, with 8k at marathon race pace) called upon a kind of toughness. I pushed myself into different levels of discomfort in all of them. I did the hard thing instead of the easy thing. Maybe there’s some toughness in that – in all running, in fact.

I guess it’s just that I don’t value the kind of toughness that measures itself against the (in)abilities of others. I used to. I used to be out on the bitter and icy streets, thinking how much tougher I was than those runners who wimped out on the treadmill or, even worse, dumped their run altogether because of the conditions. But I’ve mellowed. I now measure my toughness against my goals – am I doing what it takes to reach them? I don’t worry too much about what I think other people might think. Well. Most of the time I don’t.

I salute those runners still out there braving the cold. Some are there because there’s no easy alternative – not all folks are as lucky as I am to have easy and cheap access to a treadmill. Some are out there to prove something to themselves or to others. And some just don’t think about it one way or another – they just run. I respect all of them – even if I don’t share the same motivation.