Fourteen hours since my early morning run, but it’s still tingling the parts that other beers cannot reach.
When I got into work this morning, I found everyone talking about how cold it is. “It was even colder at 5:45, when I went for a run”, I remarked casually. Extended silence. Someone coughed nervously.
Then:” Running? You went running? This morning? What did you wear? A fur-lined tracksuit?”
“Just a teeshirt, some shorts, and a very large smile”, I said.
One of the funniest, and one of the best, and yes, one of the most frustrating, things about discovering running is that so few people believe you when you tell them how great it makes you feel. Everyone can relate to running for a bus; people understand about feeling knackered from a day’s shopping, or a morning’s housework. And they extrapolate. They think: well it’s bad enough rushing off to the corner shop before it closes, or sprinting 200 yards to the bus-stop; and let’s see now… running five miles is about 37 times the distance, so running five miles must be 37 times worse than running for my bus. Hmm. No thanks.
They’re right that sprinting in your work shoes is a nasty experience. But they’re wrong to think that proper running (or my version of it) is anything like it. And more critically, they don’t understand that it gets better. It gets better after the first mile or so, and it gets better after the first few months.
Have you ever gone to the cinema or theatre, and wanted to walk out after five minutes because you knew that you weren’t going to enjoy it? But stayed because you’d paid your money, or were too embarrassed to leave… only to find that eventually you got sucked into the film or the play, and ended up loving it? We all have.
Running, I try to tell people, is just like that. The beginning of a run, or of a period of running, is always rotten. But if you stick with it, the cold just vanishes. The rain begins to bounce off your beaming face. The sound of the frost crunching rhythmically beneath your feet… soon stops sounding like a hazard, and becomes a source of comfort instead.
I’ve said before that running is a kind of medicine, a feel-good pill, where the horrible side-effects come first, and the pleasure later. The palpitations, the sweating, the breathlessness, the pains in the lower limbs, the social embarrassment, the paranoia, the depression… followed shortly afterwards by day-long elation. Winter just adds a bit to each side of that line. Yes, there’s another side-effect to contend with: short-term shivering. But there’s also a sense of freedom that you never quite get on a warm day. Far from being mad to run semi-naked round the streets in the winter, we are the clever ones: reaching for, and usually finding, something quite uniquely liberating and inspiring. And like everything that’s worth having, yes, I suppose there is some kind of sacrifice to make. But chilly knees? Not a bad bargain if it makes us feel like this. Best of all is that you don’t even have to be any good at it to get the prize.
Yes! Roll on tomorrow morning. And let’s hope it snows overnight, and the wind starts to whip up a bit…
