Heart and Soles

Lasting effects

After the Philadelphia Marathon in November, I felt sore the next day, but by that Thursday I was happily out on the roads again.  As last month's New Jersey Marathon was a different running experience, it was also a different recovery experience. 

I pushed my body to its limits on Sunday, May 4.  After sleeping soundly for 10 hours, the plan was to spend the beautiful, sunny Monday on the Jersey Shore with my girlfriend, Karen.  Although that meant a lot of walking, it was still better than getting up and going to work.  My gait was admittedly funny-looking as we strolled through downtown Red Bank and when I did try to walk normally, it led to whimpers and yelps of "ow" with every step.  Later, we did some more walking, this time on the beaches of Sandy Hook, where the soft sand made for much more comfortable footfalls.

Most of the soreness was in my right Achilles tendon, calf and thigh, as well as my left knee.  In short, I was hurtin'.  Walking meant aching; getting up and sitting down were chores; and forget about taking the stairs (oddly, going down steps hurt more than going up).  This time, when I hit the road again after three rest days (using Hal Higdon's "Zero Week" schedule) things weren't so great.  Keeping it slow was easy, keeping it pain-free was not.  Sunday, I was still feeling some pain in the Achilles and knee and had to quit after seven miles.

No one can predict how much time is needed to recover from a marathon because it's different for every person and every race.  Rather than jump into my next plan to train for a summer 5K, I did another easy week, playing it by ear and listening to my body.  I made up my own schedule for the week: three miles on Tuesday, six on Wednesday and Saturday, four on Thursday and eight on Sunday.  The only rule: Don't push it.  As painful jogs gave way to comfortable runs, I could feel my body strengthening, the pain turning to ache, to nuisance then to memory.  My pace dropped from the eight-minute range to the seven-minute range without putting in any extra effort. 

After an excellent eight-miler (fast, comfortable, pain-free), I sent a text message to my mom and to Karen: "The kid is back."  It had taken a couple of weeks, but it was time to bring back the speed and train for a 5K.

The unheroic portion of our program

Clocks don't lie, although they DO exaggerate now and then, so I am forced to face the truth: I am now, officially, an Eight-Minute Man.

And I HATE it. Never in my 33 years of running, in any official race of any distance, had I put up a time  as slow as eight minutes per mile. Until the Montclair 10K, earlier this month. And I ran hard...I mean, as hard as my limited training and the relatively warm day allowed. I battled the familiar lung-pinch and leg-sag in the fourth and fifth miles. I found my focus narrowing with effort, images of spectators and scenery flying at me like film or theater creatures out of darkness.

When I turned the last corner and saw that 50:something-something on the FINISH clock, I knew. Eight-plus bleeping minutes per bleeping mile. Seeing my name on the results list, WAY down there, was gonna hurt. Hadn't I run 43-minutes-something just two years ago? Was I facing a Dorian Gray moment, my body finally registering the age it had so staunchly resisted for so long, exposing me as a posing, wannabe weenie?

Then a very good friend, waiting at the finish, set me straight. Time to get over myself. Who the hell CARES whether I'm fast or slow, medal-winning or mediocre? I showed up, ran it, finished. I had been shooting for 50 minutes but I had estimated an hour, and I had beaten that. Now it was time to shut up. Maybe, finally, I would start to understand what so many others in the races I ran through the years experienced, the five- and six-hour marathoners, the dogged men and women and children coming in near the back, unheralded, unnoticed except by friends and family. We can, she reminded me, never REALLY know what another runner is going through. But we can broaden the range of our own experience and learn to relate.

Every aging runner, every athlete, faces a loss of skill and capacity, a tightening of stride and diminishing of breath and blood flow, a brittling of bone and sinew. The fact that we keep showing up matters, for our own good and for the sake of the race. We are, in a good sense, filling out the field.

This does not excuse my reduced effort in training, my concessions to a wider life, my decisions to watch a movie or take a walk rather than hammer out a 10-miler or a set of intervals on the track. The truth is, I gave the Montclair race a good effort, and 50-minutes-plus is exactly what I earned.

An eight-minute-mile pace still sucks. But I'm not condemned to it. It reflects how I'm living -- in many ways happier than I have been in much faster years -- and what I value these days. That 43-something I clocked two years ago to take home the trophy came off a summer spent working on my feet in a fast-food place in Yellowstone Park and training on hills at 7,000 feet. Now I'm on my butt most of the day, and I've curtailed the long runs and speed work in favor of spending time with a loved one and enjoying life more. 

So I am getting over myself. Slowly, the way I'm doing everything else. And I'm remembering that the act and art of running should include joy, somewhere, the way living should. The best part of the Montclair race was having somebody wonderful waiting for me at the finish, happy to see me, reminding me of what matters most. And I still have the power to improve, with effort. Next race, the Lawyers for Kids 5K in Morris Township, I'm shooting a for the 7:59 pace...and reminding myself to appreciate being out there. We all, if we're lucky, have a rocking chair waiting. And we can still enjoy the view.