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