Why do we want to be so romantic about running?
John L. Parker might have been the best at it, but what's the point?
A while back, a post by Jamie of Running High showed up in my inbox. I recommend that you read it, not just because it’s beautiful, but also because I think it hits on something that I’ve come to believe in myself: it’s dangerous to be too poetic about running.
I, too, fell in love with the sport when I began to train seriously. I read about Quenton Cassidy’s insane 60x400m workout and recited the phrase about anything burning if the fire is hot enough over terrible meals of garbage food with other runners. I have dreamed of going Again to Carthage and quitting my desk job to run away to the middle of nowhere to devote myself to the marathon. To let the world pass me by, and focus all of my energy on the pure, moral, noble efforts of running.
But none of that is real. There is nothing noble about taking twelve thousand steps a day, spending an hour or more of my waking hours on a road to nowhere, just for the sake of trying to get a little bit faster over the course of years and years of consistent practice.
See, even there, I can’t help but try to dress the whole thing up. I think endurance sports lend themselves to this sort of romanticism because they so often trend toward isolation. If one is lucky, they often have company on runs or rides, but I would wager that most people train alone most of the time. And when you’re spending that much time alone on a mostly-pointless hobby taken to the extreme, it’s easy to want to ascribe some moral goodness to the activity. There’s no one there to tell you to knock it off.
In a vacuum, perhaps the only problem with this is that endurance athletes might be a little obnoxious. As we don’t live in a vacuum, I think there are additional risks we run when we try to moralize our exercise.
It can be tempting for humans to frame adversity that we face as the kind of struggle we’d read about in a novel, only starring ourselves as the protagonist. I don’t know exactly why we do this. Perhaps it’s a way for us to reassure ourselves that we can have a storybook ending—if there’s an author out there shaping the course of events, then all we have to do is persevere and all will turn out well. And if things don’t turn out well, then it’s not the end of the story yet.
This is helpful when what one is enduring is difficult and one’s circumstances are largely out of one’s own control. Faith that things will turn out well can make things otherwise unbearable barely bearable. But running is something we inflict upon ourselves. Every day, we choose to put on the shoes and walk out the door in weather mild, extreme, or otherwise. We choose the workout, the distance, the goal. The unfounded belief that everything will turn out well in the end can lead to training that at best is unproductive and at worst is actively destructive to achieving one’s goals.
It took me a long time to realize this. I would ignore what my own body was telling me in favor of following the training plan because in the story of this training block, the hero wouldn’t quit on a workout. Of course, I wasn’t thinking of it in that framing, but I did believe that I wouldn’t get the outcome I wanted if I didn’t do exactly what the plan told me to do. There was a script that I had to follow, and if I simply did what it told me to do, I would have my reward. And of course, I was really just driving myself into the ground trying to run mileage and workouts I wasn’t ready for.
After I exhausted myself, I’d get injured and my god, I’d be intolerable. I’d wonder why on earth I kept having to overcome these obstacles. They seemingly never ended. Where was the peak of the struggle? How much longer would it be until I got my big PRs? Again, it was excruciating to be around me. When the injury resolved, I was building up both my mileage and my narrative for the success I felt like I was owed at the end of the training block. Rinse and repeat. And boy howdy did I repeat.
I can’t say exactly what changed my perspective. Perhaps it was just mental exhaustion with the whole process. I might have just been unable to continue believing that I was ever going to get through a training cycle uninjured and that finally broke the spell. Whatever it was, it worked. And at that point, I was able to see running for what it really is: something I do ostensibly for fun! When I stopped trying to ascribe a deeper meaning to my running, I was able to finally get back to enjoying it.
When I started enjoying running again, the gains finally started pouring in. There was no pressure to perform because no one was watching. (Or reading, as the metaphor would have it.) Because there was no pressure, I didn’t have to take it so deadly seriously, and meant that the stakes were low enough that I could go ahead and take an unplanned rest day if I felt like I needed one. Finally allowing myself to listen to my body and plan my training based on how I felt (along with a very, very healthy dose of PT) gave me the smooth, uneventful training cycle that led to the success I’d been overworking toward for so many years.
There aren’t a lot of new things to write about if you want to write about running. The tips and tricks don’t change all that often, and if you’re not someone like Jack Daniels, you’re probably not going to write a good book about training. It’s tempting to try to romanticize the mundane, then, because it feels like there’s nothing else to do. But I’ve seen training logs and weekly updates from folks that are far more informative, inspiring, and most importantly, realistic than anything John L. Parker ever came up with1.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love these books. But now I can read them the same way I can go back and listen to Cute Without the ‘E’ and enjoy it without feeling all the things I did when I listened to it in 2005.