Three runs in three successive days. Crikey. Here I am, gulping lungfuls of air. This could be it, boys. Perhaps I’ve finally broken through the ice.
On Thursday morning I got up early and checked my mail. Ah, a message from Graham in Australia, or Mid Life Crisis Man, as forum-users will know him. I shouldn’t betray confidences, but equally, I shouldn’t fail to acknowledge what a decent geezer this man is. His post-Ashes desolation was as authentic as our glee, and I felt almost guilty when he mailed me his despairing surrender towards the end of Kevin Pietersen’s Ashes-winning innings on the final day of the final Test.
The recent mail offered plenty of encouraging hints that things may be looking up: My local deli owner introduced me to Zerutti salted baby capers, which with smoked salmon and a perfect avocado on some lightly toasted Turkish pide bread is a simple treat of unusual altitude. And my attempts at brewing beer at home have been fantastically successful.
He went on to make some observations and list a few snippets of news. It wasn’t one thing in particular, but the accumulation that was so affecting, and like most good writing, it added up to more than the sum of its parts. If I’d been drunk it might have left me with moistened eyes. But this was 6:30 in the morning, and I did something much more useful. I put on my running gear and went for my staple round-the-block 3½-miler. Yesterday evening I did the same. And again this morning. Running had been on the agenda for a couple of weeks, but each time I reached for the button, I found it greyed-out. Until that morning. Graham’s mail somehow enabled it again, and I thank him for that.
I spent most of this morning’s breathy plod thinking about the first mile. Or should that be The First Mile? It does seem to take on that significance sometimes. Every first mile is pretty awful, and I’m glad that it is. Running is so good that it has to have a price. Why should we get it for nothing? Those in the know realise it’s a trifling fee, and pay it gladly. It’s non-runners who make a sow’s ear from the offer of a silk purse. We know that once the First Mile is buried, we can settle down and enjoy ourselves.
I was thinking about my own running career, and where it had brought me. I looked up some stats the other night. Taking the first run of the 2002 London Marathon campaign as my starting point, I’ve been running for 1384 days. Of that 1384-day span, I’ve actually run only on 470 days (34%). 914 (66%) have been inert. In that time I’ve run a total of 2512 miles, making an average of 5.34 miles per run.
Take my word for it, I typed out those figures with a faintly ironic smile. My belief holds, or has until now, that Motivation is the god of running. It’s the spark that starts the fire and the fuel that keeps it burning. For many of us, maintaining our enthusiasm for running really is like trying to keep a campfire burning on a windy night. This constant struggle against ourselves and our self-esteem is part of the game, and the way we approach it becomes part of the journey of self-discovery. I wrote that here a year ago. August 2004
I reread it recently. It was déjà vu all over again. I still believe that motivation is the key-stone of it all, but I’m beginning to ask whether my tired old motivation strategy is worth a light. Stats. I’m beginning to re-evaluate them. My creed has always commanded runners to keep detailed records, and use them to build targets, and to use those targets for motivation. But they work both ways. They can be the rope you cling to as you inch towards the light, but they can be the rope that hangs you too. How lovely the spreadsheet looks when things are going well, but when they are not, how damaging to see your failure so vividly, so incontestably logged.
For 976 days – almost 3 years – between December 2002 and August 2005, I weighed myself every day and recorded the figure in my spreadsheet. The reason? Why, motivation of course. For this entire period I’ve been telling whoever would listen that keeping a note of your weight is enormously helpful. And yes, when I look through the figures, when I run my eye along the graphs that spring from these figures, I can see the numbers fall as I enter another wind-myself-up-and-go phase. Ah, er, but then I see the upward trend again as the motivation fades.
The figures speak for themselves. On Day 1 of the 976, Saturday December 7th 2002, I weighed in at 218 pounds. A month ago, on August 21st 2005, I was… 218 pounds. Yes, that is how motivating my spreadsheet has been.
“In mitigation, m’lud, my client had just returned from a trip to the United States where unfortunately, he succumbed to the, erm, the temptation of the hamburger and uh, something known as the… the French Fry….”
Yes, the States trip was a nutritional man-trap that I failed to side-step, and I managed to put on 8 pounds in a week, but that is no excuse. My weight graph has the same profile as the Beachy Head Marathon. Swoops and climbs, swoops and climbs….
It doesn’t work, does it?
Let’s be clear about this, motivation is indeed the grand lubricant in anyone’s running – even for a plump, panting, middle-aged bloke like me. Particularly for someone like me, actually. But the log isn’t all I’ve cracked it up to be. I’ve been trying to use it to stay afloat, but it keeps spinning round and dumping me in the river. Let the denial cease.
What am I saying here? That I won’t keep my spreadsheet anymore? No, not that. I don’t see any harm in having a record of when I’ve run and how far. But as from today, it’s not a tool. It’s no longer a weapon for beating myself with. It’s a decoration; a passive reference. The wider implication (yes, pun intended) is that I have to get less obsessive about weight. It’s still true that running is easier and more enjoyable if you’re not 30 pounds overweight, and that will be addressed, but I’ll weigh myself just occasionally from now on, and I won’t bother writing it down. I can carry on pondering, but in the interests of taking the anal out of analysis, the weight spreadsheet has been defenestrated.
Running is good, that’s all I need to know. Races are good too, but the trouble comes when the race becomes the end and the running becomes the means to that end. No more. From now on, the running is the end. The running is the self-contained objective. The race is an enjoyable diversion; socially interesting; an excuse to visit new places and make new friends; that’s it. The race is no longer the light at the end of the tunnel. The race and the daily running are just two fingers on the same hand. No more will I beat myself up if I find that my schedule has scored more miles than me this week. Why should I feel bad about that? It’s me who’s been out and done the distances and felt the pain. What’s the schedule done for me to feel so inferior?
Ah, but what happens when I decide to do a marathon? I need to tick off all those weekly checkboxes, don’t I? What happens if I don’t manage those three 20 mile runs? What happens if I run only three times this week instead of four? The honest answer is that I’ve no idea what will happen. I’ll find out soon enough, I suspect.
I could write more here, but that’s it for the moment. I think I may pop out for a beer and ponder this some more. But I feel good.
Guess what I’m beginning to think about the last 4 years? These first 4 years of running? Yes. That they have been The First Mile. The first mile, and I’ve come to the end of it at last.
Let the real fun begin.
