What Are You Running From? — Touched with Fire Media

By my calculations, I’ve run a little more than 6000 miles since I took the practice up seriously, around the time Barack Obama was elected President the first time. I’ve run two marathons, four half-marathons, and more 10K races than I can remember. I’ve gone running in Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Minnesota, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island; I’ve run in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, Mexico, and the US. I’ve been out in the middle of the night because I couldn’t sleep. I’ve seen countless summer sunrises on days that promised heat and humidity. I’ve strapped on a parka and tights and sweats and a hat and a mask and gone running in subzero temperatures. The other day I was running at four in the afternoon when it was 95 degrees, which is by far my least favorite time of day to go running. I’ve lost sixty pounds, gained fifty back, and lost fifteen of them again. I’ve run over the tops of mountains and down into the bottoms of canyons. Over bridges, across fields, around golf courses, along the shoulder of the highway, on treadmills, up and down the stairs of the building where I worked. One time I ran through people’s back yards because I got lost and panicked. Another time I barfed on the B train after getting out too late and ending a 16-miler in savage August heat — one of two times I was that guy on a subway car.

There have been days when I just couldn’t do it, no matter how hard I tried force myself. I still remember a winter day about three years ago when I was visiting Portland from Minnesota. It was about 55 degrees — roughly 50 degrees warmer than back in Minneapolis — and I strapped on my gear to go, dressing lightly because it was bound to be easy. I ran about two blocks and felt much colder than I ever did trudging through the snow around Lake Calhoun. I stopped and quite literally threw my hands up in the air. Fuck it, I yelled. It was midafternoon in one of Portland’s busiest neighborhoods. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it, fuck it! This is how I managed to gain weight while maintaining a fairly steady, 15-mile-a-week running habit. I said fuck it too many times. That I gained weight so quickly is probably down to SSRI antidepressants and depression-related drinking.

I don’t have a very firm grip on what drives me do to this, though there must be something. Both my parents ran marathons when I was a kid, so there may be some form of nature or nurture at play: perhaps I come from marathon genes; maybe I grew up believing that marathons were simply what adults did. I do remember when I first started running seriously I had just been dumped, and I would go out hard, thinking fuck her with every heavy footfall. At some point I would grow so exhausted I could no longer be angry. But I have always had the sense that I was running from something. On some level, it’s about escaping myself. I run because violent physical exercise, sustained over the course of several hours, annihilates my personality, so that I no longer suffer from it. I am no longer filled with anxiety and shame; I am no longer easily driven to fits of pique by the stupidity and lack of consideration of other people; I am no longer cold and analytical and removed from my life. In the agony of endurance, I am simply a brain and a body rattling around together. The physical blocks out the mental.

I hit the wall at about mile 20 of my first marathon. The New York Marathon makes a point of hitting all 5 boroughs, though of course Staten Island and the Bronx get the short shrift, as they so often do: you start on the Staten end of the Verrazzano Bridge, meaning your feet fall on Staten Island only as you leave it; and late in the race you take a brief detour through the South Bronx, and that section has the distinct feeling of checking a box. It’s nothing like the mile upon mile run in Brooklyn and Queens, where most New Yorkers live. It’s considerably shorter than the 5 miles spent running through Harlem and Midtown on the way to a spectacular finish in Central Park. But it was where I hit the wall. My cousin and her boyfriend were standing along the side of the course there, cheering me on. I stopped to talk — I am a liesurely enough marathoner that it wasn’t going to make that much difference in my time. But when I got back on the road, I felt I had died. My legs no longer worked, my feet no longer worked. Even my arms hurt from swinging. All that was left of me was the sheer will to finish, as I reeled off 13 minute miles for the last 6 miles of the course. (For comparison, my PR in the mile is 6 minutes and 5 seconds; my typical distance-running pace is about 10.30 a mile.)

I have never been more purely human than I was in those six miles. The next year, on a much tougher course, I suffered similarly, as some evil race planner had placed a heartbreak hill, 2 miles long, at mile 22 — but I was expecting it. I knew what it was to hit the wall by then. No, it was as I dragged my almost-lifeless body down the streets on Manhattan, streets I had always walked with pure relish before then, that I experienced what it was to be an animal, stripped of all the bullshit. This is not to say that I want to spend all my time in that place, devoid of personality and pure in my pain. But I think it’s significant that I experienced a distinct crash in happiness in a period when I was no longer shooting for that moment.

I’m signed up for a marathon in a little less than three months, in Tucson. It’s meant to be mostly downhill, which will be both a blessing and a curse — could lose more toenails than usual. I currently weigh 25 pounds more than I did when I ran my first marathon, and 35 pounds more than I did when I ran my second. I worry about that. I’ll probably shed about 10 pounds in the next 11 weeks, and while that’s great, I’m not 100% sure that’s going to be good enough. I guess it’ll just have to be. Maybe it means the back-end pain is going to be even worse. Maybe that’s a good thing.

I have a goal to one day run a marathon on every continent. That means, after Tucson, that I have at least six to go. I’m hoping to run one in Australia in 2016 — there’s one in Tasmania in September. But I’ve learned not to make plans that far ahead.