Tag: running is awful

We Must Be Crazy

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It struck me this morning, watching my breath rise in wispy, ghostlike puffs as I was wrapped in a long-sleeved insulated shirt and a vibrant insulated hoodie (I call this color please-don’t-hit-me-with-your-car-orange), to say nothing of the track pants, thick gloves, and knit cap.

You have to be a little bit crazy to do this.

Sport, Moon, Moon Phase, Mood, Run, Silhouette, Runners

Even a casual runner like myself will have to deal with a lot in the pursuit of a bit of exercise. Here in Atlanta, that includes some truly punishing hills just about anywhere you try to go, not to mention wickedly schizophrenic weather (it was 72 degrees on Christmas day, and in the upcoming five days we’ll go from 20 degrees to 60 and back again if the weather outlets are to be believed). But wherever you do this running thing, many struggles are the same. If you run in the cities or the suburbs, there’s traffic to dodge. If you run in the country or on trails, you’ve got ticks and snakes and mosquitoes and spiderwebs to avoid.

Today it’s cold weather, and while I know that calling 22 degrees “cold” earns a snort and a snigger from some of you folks up north, it’s about as cold as the bones of this fragile Georgian can stand. I’ve got almost a dozen pieces of cold-weather gear for running, and none of it seems to put me in any sort of comfort zone. Fleece-lined gloves. Moisture-wicking hats. Shirts in all thicknesses and weights. I permutate the system, layer up, and try to adjust for the slightest fluctuation in temperature, wind, and precipitation, but it’s impossible to get it right. When I start out, the cold slices through all that and chills the bones, but once the engine gets running, suddenly I’m sweltering in all these layers and running around with the jacket undone, the sleeves rolled up, the gloves in a pocket.

And the summer. God.

When you’re a not-in-the-best-shape-of-your-life dude like me, there’s only so many layers of clothing you’re comfortable removing, even if you run in the wee hours of the morning. Then the temperature creeps up into the nineties and every step feels like stepping forward into warm Jello, the air positively gelatinous with humidity. The clothes smell of sweat even after coming through the wash. Even your feet perspire.

Then there are the injuries, and a runner without injuries is like a politician without a closet full of skeletons. The past two years, I’ve fought off nagging injuries in the calves, heels, and ankles of both feet. My wife gets horrible blisters and knee issues and, through running, discovered she actually had a broken bone in her spine (probably from gymnastics earlier in life, but unearthed by running).

Point is, running, as a whole, tends toward the unpleasant. For the most part, it isn’t a lot of fun.

Yet, pounding the pavement in the relative stillness of the early morning, watching those puffs of misty breath rise and scatter before my face, feeling the cold leaking into the soles of my feet, the tips of my fingers, the bulb of my nose, it hit me.

Despite all that the run sucked (and it did suck: I was slower than I’ve been in weeks, I felt short of breath, and my left heel was acting up again), I was still undeniably enjoying myself. I was glad I’d hauled myself out of bed, despite not having to work today. The run felt right, like an old Def Leppard t-shirt from high school or your memory-foam pillow at the end of a particularly long day.

I guess it’s not surprising that I’ve embraced such a masochistic form of exercise: you have to be maybe more than a little bit crazy to decide in your thirties that you want to be a writer, and start committing hours every day toward what most people think of as a pipe dream. Putting down your words and thoughts and the bizarre worlds that exist in your mind for others to see. Thinking about stories and narratives and conflicts and subplots when you could just as easily veg out and watch a House marathon on the weekends (man, I miss that show). Choosing that mental torture when I could just as easily not seems as indicative as anything that there’s something wrong with me.

Writer, Shadow, Man

Running and writing, two great forms of torture that taste great together!

Is this a universal truth — that the things you love cause you pain and discomfort like this? Frankly, it’s kind of bullshit. I wish I enjoyed other forms of exercise, or even better, that I didn’t care about exercise at all, but I just can’t. Nothing else floats my boat. And writing … well, maybe all this will come to nothing, but I decided two years ago that not trying was no longer acceptable, so come hell or hot Atlanta summers (which are practically synonymous, but whatever), I’m going to keep going.

We must be crazy to choose this running life, this writing life.

But upon further reflection, we’d be even crazier not to.

Misty Morning Run

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Life is stressful. At work, there are always papers to grade, meetings to attend, procedures to follow, and then, of course, there are the students. At home, there’s dinner to make (on the nights I’m there to make it), there’s kids to play with and read to and put to bed, dishes to wash, messes to clean up. (Sidenote: my wife is awesome. I don’t know how single parents do it.)

Then there’s the book; much as I love it, the work is exhausting. I mean, I always knew that writing would be hard, but there’s really no explaining how hard it is if you haven’t tried it. The hours, they pile up like bones at a hot-wing eating competition. I run laps in my head like a hamster on its wheel trying to make the story behave, and some days it feels like swimming upstream toward the maw of a grizzly bear.

Grizzly, Bear, Dangerous, Animal, Wild Life, Canada

(So close!)

But that’s why running is awesome.

Running is the reset button. Running is the vacation inside my own head. Running is taking the phone off its cradle (as if we even know what that means anymore). Running is … well, really it’s just putting one foot in front of the other for a while, maybe until you get tired or until you work up a decent sweat, but it certainly feels like more than that when you’re in the midst of it. Doesn’t matter how tired I am, or how stressed, or how sore I am; the run rejuvenates and invigorates the body and soothes the mind. There’s something meditative, transcendent even, in the repetitive motion, in the regularity of breath, in the pat-pat-pat of your soles on the pavement.

And somehow, the effect can be magnified by the surroundings; be it a breezy beach at low tide or a dusty trail through the endless green of the woods or, as was the case this morning, a starless, sleepy fog hanging low over the city, masking buildings and trees in the near distance.

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It does something to me, feeling that mist curling around the treetops, swallowing up vehicles as they sped into the grey. Like some enormous, malevolent thing hanging over everything, waiting to engulf it all like the maw of some Eldritch horror.

I’m hardly a photographer (just look at that ugly corner of the building, the lonely light fixture lurking at the side of the frame, ick), but just look at that spidery tree, frozen in the fog, its dendritic fingers dewy and grasping. Like an alien abduction in reverse.

…We don’t get a lot of fog in Atlanta.

Good morning for a run.

I Hate Everything

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I made a post — I want to say it was a month or so ago, when Christmas was right around the corner and we were staring down temperatures in the 70s here in Atlanta — complaining about the delightful weather we were having.

I found this funny at the time, because ha-ha, seasons are meaningless in this era of global warming, and isn’t it hilarious wearing tank tops in the dead of December?

But I suited up for my 5 AM run yesterday morning in track pants, long sleeved shirt, jacket, skullcap, gloves, and mask for the 20-degree weather and … it wasn’t funny anymore.

snowsuit

And sure, you northerners can laugh at me. But I’m a child of the scorched southern summer, dammit. I’m a Cancer, born in the dead of the hottest season in the hottest, humidest part of the country.

I griped about the warm then, and yeah, I get to gripe about the cold now.

I hate everything.

No Geminids For You

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I ran this morning, and it was gorgeous.

But it bloody well shouldn’t have been. It’s the middle of December, for goodness’ sake. When I go out for a 5 AM run, I should be reaching for the tights (yes, male runners can wear tights, shut up), gloves and hat, not for the sleeveless tee and lightweight shorts. The temperature was in the mid 60s with just a hint of rain in the air; in fact, I got spritzed by a delightful little sprinkle here and there throughout the jaunt.

Ideal running weather, in other words. Winter runs shouldn’t be so gorgeous. You run through the winter so that you can lament the balmy, breezy runs of the fall. You run through the winter to build up your stamina so that when spring rolls around you can pull off the chocks and blow your old records away. You run through the winter so that you can feel a measure of thankfulness for the runs you endured in the ninety-degree days and eighty-degree nights of summer.

You run in the winter, in other words, to suffer, goldfinger it, not to breezily traipse through a leisurely three miles and return home, having hardly broken a sweat.

I’d say that the weather is all out of whack, but, given as I live just outside Atlanta, it would seem that the weather is functioning exactly as intended. Next week we’ll no doubt see ice on our front lawns, to be followed by another record-breaking heatwave. January will probably start off with a rain of toads and a plague of locusts before simmering down to a balmy forty degree average or so.

But when I said the weather this morning was gorgeous, that was a lie. I was hoping for a clear sky. Why? Well…

A photographer looks at the sky at night to see the annual Geminid meteor shower on the Elva Hill, in Maira Valley, near Cuneo, northern Italy on December 12, 2015.

It seems to be a function of the lovely and totally predictable and well-behaved Atlanta weather that I be deprived of witnessing any astronomical points of interest this year. A few months ago, the Supermoon was in town, and I missed it thanks to a blanket of unproductive cloud cover. About a season earlier, there was a meteor shower that I missed for the same reason. This week, the Geminid meteor shower is in full display… apparently. Of course, I wouldn’t know, because once again, there’s a sheet of clouds lying low over the entire area keeping me from seeing a damn thing.

With that luck firmly in place, during the total solar eclipse in 2017, here in Atlanta, we’ll miss it thanks to a patch of cloud that passes over right around noon.

It’ll probably still be a gorgeous day for a run.

Running and Writing: Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together!

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It’s been a long time since I had a running post, and I wondered if I was done with them. After all, this is primarily a blog about the writing of novels and the tribulations of a writer of novels learning that he doesn’t actually know very much about the writing of novels. What does running have to do with that?

Well, a lot, actually.

I take a bit of a Dirk Gently approach to life, always trying to keep in mind the interconnectedness of all things. A hummingbird flaps its wings in Taiwan and creates a hurricane in Florida, or an angry old man sends back soup at a deli and the next thing you know, skinny jeans are going out of style and cats are scooping their own poop.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing, it’s that it’s hard. Really hard. I’ve called it a Sisyphean effort before, and that’s not hyperbole: take your eye off the work and it can backslide on you, rolling your project and your will to work on it all the way back down to the bottom of the hill you spent five months climbing. And that’s when the wind is at your back, when things are going your way and you feel really truly in touch with what you’re writing.

But those are the rare days.

A lot of writing (the biggest part of writing, of late) is writing when your heart isn’t in it, when you fear the work is crap, that you’re crap, that every idea you’ve ever had or will ever have is crap, and that the paper that might have been used printing out your manuscript would be better used as paper that’s actually designed for cleaning up crap. Authorial self-doubt, the fear of rejection, an inability to find the time to focus or the right circumstances to concentrate… all these can add up to make the prospect of writing as daunting as an ant deciding it wants to cut a tunnel through the Rocky Mountains. On those days, you really have to be clearheaded, you have to train your mind to block out all that negativity and self-sabotage.

Which is where the running comes in. Say what you will about the dubious benefits of prolonged cardio exercise or how bad it is for your knees (or better yet, don’t, because I will just laugh at you), but any activity that gets the blood flowing to your body proper is by its very nature going to get the blood flowing to your brain. All that fresh, hot, oxygen-laced, endorphin-riddled blood hitting the brain is like a cool breeze in the middle of a Georgia July, like stepping into a heated storefront after being out in a New York winter, like the first pop in a fresh roll of bubble wrap. It gets you focused, it gets you clear-headed, it gets you calm.

Add to that, of course, the fact that with running in particular, it’s just you and the road (or trail or track or whatever) and the low, rhythmic shuffling of your feet. If zen masters advocate focusing on the simple infinity of the “om”, then there’s a wealth of universal truth to be found in the relentless slap slap slap of your feet on the pavement. There is no better way to get some alone time with your thoughts than to lace up your sneakers and go out for a few meditative miles.

If you’re a regular reader, you might know that I’ve been struggling with a foot injury for the last year and a half that’s made it difficult for me to fully enjoy my runs. It’s been impossible for me to cover long distances or to push my pace much above a brisk jog without setting myself back something horrible. But I’m muscling through, perhaps idiotically so (especially if you ask my wife) because of one thing:

I write better on the days when I exercise than on days when I don’t. I write better on days that I run than on days when I “work out”. I’m clearer, more at peace, less stressed, less consumed with doubt. If I can start the day with that one accomplishment under my belt, it makes any other goal — from writing a few hundred words to grading a stack of horrible essays — seem that much closer to my grasping hands.

Problem is, there’s only so much you can say about running, right? I mean, sure, every run is different: the melodies of the birdsong, the low lullaby of the cars rumbling past, the poemic abuse from passing motorists weaves itself into a unique symphony every time you step out. But by the same token, of course, every run is pretty much the same: laces on, one foot in the other, tromp stomp tromp stomp, have a shower, go on with your day.

So on the one hand, I hesitate to write too much about running, because I fear it gets monotonous. Then again, I wonder if I don’t beat the writing about writing horse to death, as I fear I may have done of late.

Nevertheless, running, as I said before, is a part of my process. Which means it belongs here.

Oh, and: I went for a run yesterday. It was good. Probably go for one tomorrow. I think that one will be good, too.

Image from Avicii’s Levels music video.