Running on ink and paper

I’m a little surprised to find that the new issue of Runner’s World is still sitting on my reading stand, unopened after a week.

There have been times when the magazine was greeted at the mailbox like an old friend and read immediately from cover to cover.

I’m sure I’ll get around to reading this issue, but I’m wondering why the thrill is gone.  One reason, I suppose, is the existence of digital media. The Runner’s World website is a more familiar hangout for me these days than is the paper and ink version of the brand.  The Master’s forum is a particular favorite, a place I often visit a couple times a week.

Back in the day, the magazine was all we had, and it was a lot—great articles on technique, inspirational runners, events and gear. I even enjoyed the ads. The same is true today; the magazine’s content has never been better. The editorial team has mission, focus and personality.

Perhaps it’s just that I’ve outlived the publication’s demographic focus. For one thing,  I don’t ever expect to see a running geezer on the cover. (And, that’s fine. We know what we look like.)  And I pretty much know what to do with my diet, how to treat my sore knee, and where I’m going to race this season.

My lukewarm response to the recent issue notwithstanding, I’ve just glanced at the cover call-outs on the magazine again, and I’m feeling inspired to crack this baby open.  See you later online.

Running ahead of your demons

A good friend of mine took up cycling many years ago and pursued the sport with a kind of manic intensity, as I understand it.  Excessive riding seems to have led to a chronic, extremely painful groin injury, which in turn set off a long stretch of depression.  All pleasure drained from his life and he was unable to work. He became suicidal.

The darkness was punctuated with periods of mania, in which he spent money wildly and interviewed strangers on the street. Now diagnosed as bipolar, he is using medication and other pursuits to hold things together. His cycling days appear to be over. 

My sense is that cycling for him was a form of self-medication, and it worked for a long while. As long as you’re moving, the demons can’t quite catch up with you.

Are there those who use running to keep a step ahead of depression and other mental disorders?

A member of the Runner’s World Masters forum uses a signature on his posts, “Cheaper than therapy.”   Another forum member commented recently on one of my posts that the peace to be found in running “is better than meditation.”

Without running, I’m pretty sure some of own demons would have overtaken me by now. The trick, I suppose, is to balance the physical with the mental or spiritual part of the form. If you try to run too hard, for too long, you can get caught from the other direction, as I believe my friend did. 

The world without a watch

Once you get used to running with a GPS sports watch, it’s hard to imagine the world without it.  My fine Nike Plus went on the blink the other day, the computer deciding to deny its existence all of a sudden.

Sadly, I wound up using nearly half of a vacation day trying to diagnose and fix the issue myself. The dalliance with DIY ended with an hour on the phone talking with tech support. (Though we failed to fix the problem, I will be given free service or a replacement watch.)

The incident has made me stop and think about the nature of time as relates to running. At this point in life, why should I care at all about my metrics, or the documentation that I ran at a certain place in the world? 

“How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives,” writes Annie Dillard in The Writing Life. A corollary perhaps is how we measure our time is how we measure how lives.

If  you’re watching time tick away every day, well, that’s your life. Running without a watch for a while will be a good thing, even therapeutic I think.  Maybe the moments will  become more meaningful, more lasting, more full of life.

How else might one measure a run? Today, running watchless in downtown Des Moines, I had these thoughts that seemed to have bounded beyond the clock:

• This Iowa sky, and this Des Moines skyline, well there it is and here I am.

• This muddy Des Moines River water rushing to the sea. What a wet spring it’s been. 

• There are too many people exiting the County Court House all at once. Off the sidewalk people!

• I can smell a cigarette from a greater distance than I can see the thing in hand.

• How many of these birds can I ID? Almost all of them so far!

• Could one dance around a rat in this alley at mid-day? 

• Is the song in my head an original tune? 

• I know that guy; I see him all the time; he runs darn fast for an older guy. 

• What does it feel like to run today, in fact to exist at all?

I’m finished the day's run with no time clocked and no place plotted on a map--but I have had what it is, the thing itself. 

Seven minutes of exercise is all it takes?

To a long distance runner, it might seem heretical that any sort of meaningful exercise could be accomplished in 7 minutes. Seventy minutes maybe. Seven minutes is barely long enough to warm up muscles and speed up your heart, right? 

But, that was before I read an article, “The Scientific 7-minute workout," and gave the idea a try-out.

The technique centers on some recent exercise research that proved the value of high-intensity interval training.  Interval training, so the story goes, even a few minutes of it, “produces molecular changes within muscles comparable to those of several hours of running or bike riding.”

The regimen requires you to proceed through 12 familiar exercises (pushups, lunges, jumping jacks, etc.), thirty seconds each, with 10 second intervals. You’re supposed to perform at a level that is “unpleasant”—about an 8 on a 1-10 discomfort scale.

The only piece of equipment you need is a chair.

I’ve been testing the idea mainly after work on a busy day, when there’s time for little else in the way of a workout. 

The whole process takes less than ten minutes.  Change your shoes, set the timer on a smartphone, grab a sturdy chair, and you’re ready to go.

The only apparent failing in the experiment for me so far is an inability to run through all 12 exercises in seven minutes. Even though I think I’m counting the 30s properly in my head, when the timer goes off, I’m usually still on exercise nine or ten. I think I can get better at this; it’s a personal challenge to do all twelve in exactly seven minutes. 

But the upshot is that it works, if huffing and puffing and general discomfort is any measure.

And, when you’re done—lying on the floor after a side plank finale, you do indeed feel about like you have run hard for an hour.

Read the New York Times Magazine story here: The Scientific 7-MinuteWorkout

Gone fishin'

We are what we repeatedly do; excellence is a habit, Aristotle said.  But to every time there is a season, the runner would think.  And there is a time to take a break from running. Or is that a good thing?

For me, it was time to take a week off from work and running to go fishing with two great friends from college. Tim has graciously provided a place in the Wisconsin north woods, and Phil brings his large countenance, local wisdom and various culinary delights direct from the land of his dairy farm. 

The three of us start dreaming about the whole thing in January, and when the time comes to get away it seems only right to put away all the things of routine daily life–including the running shoes.

Travel only a about marathon deep into the woods gets you off the beaten path.  In one area of our retreat, I  bet you could boat through some fifty square miles of lakes, streams and flowages without much interference.  You can spot eagles, beaver, bear and rare warblers and maybe catch a bunch of nice fish, if you’re lucky. 

In that world of woods and water I never felt too badly about not running. In fact, I rarely thought of it. It’s good enough exercise standing up in the front of a modest fishing boat, running the trolling motor and trying to flick a perfect cast toward the shore.  A couple times I practiced some tai chi exercises on a dock while watching a bobber and worm in the water.

After five days on the water I can still feel that pleasant rocking of the boat in my bones, and the effects on the leg muscles.  It works, getting away for a week and not a taking a single run.

Back home today running felt fresh, and I’m eager again to do what I repeatedly do. 

The best exercise ever

The whole thing came entirely out of the blue. In an annual physical at the company where I work, the doctor was finishing up his routine and asked how I was feeling. I said great except for a sore knee. I told him I was worried the injury was going to keep me from running in an upcoming half marathon.

He proceeded to recommend an exercise he called 10x10x20s, which he said thought would help me get through the race.

You lie on you back, raise your leg ten inches off the floor and hold it for ten seconds.  Twenty  reps on each side.  Try to remember to do the “tens” after each run, he said. Then he gave me the name of a good sports doctor in town.

As an aside, next I discover that he's a runner and we’re both competing in the Quebec Marathon, a long-shot coincidence, given the event is a great distance from Des Moines and hardly well known in our parts as any sort of destination race.

But, what a great stroke of luck to have met this fine fellow. His sound advice led me to a successful finish of the race with minimal knee pain. I’ve continued with the exercise as often as I can remember to do so. My favorite time is when watching TV rather than right after a run.

A few years ago, I learned a routine from an excellent physical therapist who was trying to help me stabilize my form. That one’s done while lying on your side. You wear an ankle weight and lift your leg from a little behind your other leg, eight reps three times. She told me it’s probably the single best routine for what I needed at the time.

These exercises aren't miracle cures, but I suspect they kept me going at a time when it was starting to feel like I was coming to the end of the road with long-distance running.

Mr. Mortality on the run

Speaking of the rare good weather one day last weekend, my niece Lindsey commented over the phone that “you don’t even want to talk about it.”  Her implication may be that if we bring something to our full attention it somehow ruins its pleasure.

One thing in this life we mostly don't want to talk about: We know that each day, each run, brings us closer to the final finish line.  Our measuring of effort, our fanaticism about long-distance training is a race against time and mortality. Not an original thought, of course, but we’re just talking here.

One reason running is a great metaphor for the human condition is because of  its routine finiteness. We put a clock to our efforts for a reason. The faster we finish a race or run, the more time there is left for the next run.

But “not talking about it” is a one way, maybe the best way, we address our limited run in this life, isn’t it? Forget about time. Run like an animal—in the moment, no memory and no mind for the future.

A favorite famous quote is one that bears on the matter: “You don’t quit running because you get old, you get old because you quit running.”

The idea has become a motto for me, because there are always good reasons, some sensible, to quit running—long distance running, at least.  Right now, for me, it’s chronic knee pain, but it could always have been something—plantar fasciitis, IT band issues, a close call with a car, and such.

There is another thought, too—that our deeper interpretations of running can be something that helps others. “The best that can come from contemplation of mortality, perhaps, is a kind of wisdom that can give others strength—not by answering questions, like those best-sellers which claims to tell you what happens after you see the white light, but by asking questions honestly,” writes Adam Kirsch in The New Yorker  of  the book “My Bright Abyss,” by Christian Wiman.

The tai chi teacher, Dr. Paul Lam, talks about how the martial arts are something you can practice all your life, that he has 90-year-olds still studying with him.  I like that idea—that there are pursuits in this life we can take to the end. I hope running is one. But I really don’t want to talk about it.