Spring running hopes

Spring! Or a sick joke of a false spring. Either way, this weather feels great after a long, stupid winter. I’m excited to run outside again soon. For me that means running at all - I only run outside. That’s not a point of principle. I’m really broke so a gym membership’s a hard expense to justify. More than that, running on a treadmill bores me like the most boring of boring things. I can run for an hour or so, well I could when I was running regularly anyway, but after about 20 minutes on a treadmill I’m desperate to stop. Outside running is genuinely fun; treadmill running sucks the worthwhile from the activity. I mean, I realize there are health benefits still, but the thing is, ugh.

I live right by a running path lined by trees which are occasional homes to kestrels, alongside a creek where I’ve seen minks, and the midpoint of my typical run is a waterfall. I feel very lucky. The natural beauty will be a great perk. So will the sleep - a good running day makes me sleep better. I used to think it was the physical tiredness. Maybe that’s a factor, but other exercise doesn’t seem to do it as much. It helps but it doesn’t do what running does for me. The real reason I sleep better on a running day, I think, is connected to what makes running feel how it does.

The first five or fifteen minutes of running are really wretched. I want to do anything else. I distract myself looking around and listening to music. After my body is all the way warmed up, and after I’ve crested the hill of dislike, I’m ready to run. It’s not work anymore. Of course parts of my body are still working hard but the rest of me just eases up, un-knots. My thoughts flow calmly, stresses and anxieties are mostly turned off, I concentrate on the music I’m listening to and the movement and I just feel really good. A friend came up with a writing-related metaphor. He said, “I have laser vision and there is an iceberg in my way. If I stare at it long enough, it will melt.” That works when it comes to writing, usually anyway, and it works with running, and the feeling of the icebergs melting is great. Everything liquid, no longer hemmed in by the looming weight that piles up in life. (Random thought: that metaphor may someday seem sad or inappropriate, given melting glaciers.)

At one point I was trying to improve my times. When I start back to running outside (I ran until late November or early December when everything iced over; I was worried about slipping and falling. I think I’ve run once or twice since then.) I’ll want to get back to the times I was at before, but much more than faster times I want to increase distances. Running feels so good, why get it over with faster? I want the opposite, I want to spend more time in that mental state.

I currently run a regular five kilometer route. Ish, anyway. Close to enough to 5k for my purposes, it might be a tenth of a mile more or less. That’s fine by me. Once I get back into regular running, when the weather clears enough that the path’s not iced over, I’m going to make a point to ramp back to a 5k easily. Then I’ll spend about a month doing regular 5k runs. Then I want to build up. I’d like to get into a schedule of regular 5k punctuated with a longer run that gets progressively longer. I’d eventually like to do a half-marathon. I think I’m going to enter more races too. I’m not competitive, it’s all about the personal best for me. My only race was a great experience though. Everyone was really nice, and it’s lovely to be around a bunch of other people who also really like to run. (And at the end there was both beer and cake! Anything about which you can say that is so obviously great.) It’s also fun to run outside in new places. I think running races more often will help me keep the aspiration to get to half-marathon. And again the point is to spend more time on a regular basis in that awesome mental state of feeling untied and fine. The more I do that, the better I feel walking around the rest of the week.