The truth is—and hopefully this confession does not
disqualify me as a “real runner”—that I have been enjoying walking. Every so often I see someone running and
think, “Oh, I’ll do that again someday,” but really any agitation I feel from
being downshifted to walking is more about the events I’ll miss because I won’t
be in shape for them. I meant to run a
5K this weekend, but this is obviously not going to happen. I meant to run a 10 miler in May. Also not going to happen. Triathlons in June are probably out. These things make me sad. (And of course it makes me crazy that I can’t
do the things that I see need doing: a trip to Costco, gardening, mildew
cleaning. Honestly, I don’t particularly
love to clean bathrooms, it’s just not having it done that annoys me, but
that’s a rant for another day.)
The background truth, again at the risk of losing my runner
status, is that I’ve been slogging through my runs for a while. I knew I ought to be enjoying them, but my
hips were sore all the time. I did
stretches and leg lifts and hip hikes all day long. Nothing seemed to make it any better. My body felt heavy and slow. I have been feeling unreasonably fatigued. When I tried to fix the sluggishness by doing
some speedwork, I found I didn’t have any speed. I just plain ol’ could not get myself around
the track quickly, and that was demoralizing and depressing, even though I
wanted to be able to shrug it off and just appreciate that I could run at all. I was frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t
keep up with my running groups. I was
embarrassed that I was so slow and so easily worn out. I maybe should have hung it up for a while at
that point, but that’s not my style.
Instead, I figured the only solution was to try harder, to run more, to
start doing speedwork again, to try a new lighter “natural” running shoe. And that, my friends, is how a person sets
herself up for something like a sprained back.
I’m not going to abandon running. I am mentally prepared for a long slow road
back to health. I’ve been here
before. Several times, actually. There will be weeks of short easy runs then
months of base building. If I’m lucky, I
might be ready to do some races again by late summer or fall. The reality of that timeline makes me feel a
bit impatient in advance, but in the meantime I am surprisingly content to
walk.
Last weekend I decided to have a goal to walk about 20 miles
this week. So far, I’ve walked 26 miles in
six days, averaging about four miles a day.
Of course, it takes me almost twice as long to walk four miles as it
would take to run it, but for some reason, I’m OK with that. This is one of the ways that walking is
healing me.
Walking through my injury forces peace upon me. I do find peace in running, but often my
running is about, well, running. Even
when I say I don’t care about my pace, I still notice it. I’ll come clean: I had said I only wanted to
finish the Lost Dutchman Marathon and that if I had to have a time goal, it
would be to finish in under four hours, but then when I did finish in under
four hours, I was still disappointed in myself.
Yes, that was a “race,” so maybe it invites those types of emotions, but
for me, so did group runs. I too often
cared who was running ahead of me; I cared that there was a whole world of
people with whom I just couldn’t keep pace.
I told myself not to care, but I did.
Even when running alone without a watch, which I almost never do, I felt
slow and sore and therefore disappointed in myself. More: even when I felt great, the running was
about running. Putting forth a sustained
effort takes some mental as well as physical effort. The ease of walking, in contrast, allows me to
pray, to notice more details—in the last two weeks I’ve seen three Eastern bluebirds,
wild turkeys, a toad, baby killdeer, several hawks, and some wonderful spring
blossoms—and to work out some internal
tangles. Being injured, being a walker,
I also find that I am far easier on myself.
I am not bothered when people run past me. I don’t even keep track of time, other than
to make sure I get back home when I need to be there. I walk with the time available, and whatever
distance that happens to be, I accept.
I’ve never once calculated my walking pace. I have tried, in the past, to have that
attitude about running, but it’s difficult.
Being relaxed about running is its own kind of effort, an annoying
oxymoron. There is always a little
corner of my mind where I store a speck of panic that somehow I am falling
behind, that I’m not running far enough or fast enough. Enough for what? I couldn’t tell you, exactly. Perhaps I’m chasing down the runner I used to
be, or maybe I’m chasing the runner I wish I could be. When I walk, I’m not chasing anything. I’m never behind. I’m always just outside, moving, being alive
and glad of it.
More importantly, walking has helped me regain some
perspective. On Wednesday night, I had
the pleasure of walking with my friend Joe, who is also a downshifted runner,
having had bypass surgery last summer and a heart attack this spring. His running suspension is a bit more serious
than my discomfort. I had just told him that although it had originally been my
plan, I probably won’t be signing up for the Philadelphia Marathon this fall. It seems not to matter how many 20 milers I
put in beforehand, something about the marathon seems to beat me up to a level
where I can hardly recover. It’s
happened too many times to be coincidence.
I’m not going to be well enough to do another one this November. At that moment, Sasha and Elena ran past us,
the first of the running group. They had
just run the Boston Marathon a week and a half before, and Elena had placed
third in the 50-54 age group, beating Joan Benoit Samuelson. And back in February, one week before I ran
my marathon, Elena WON a marathon. Not
just her age group, THE MARATHON. As in,
she was the first woman to cross the finish line. Pointing to Sasha and Elena I asked, “Why can
they do it, and I can’t?”
“Do you think Cassie ever sees you and asks that?” he
replied. “You play with the hand you are
dealt. That’s all you can do.” Good point.
I can never trump the Cassie card.
We walked. “You know about Bruce,
right?” he asked.
A man from our running club, someone around Elena’s age, was
recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
I was silent for a moment. Bruce
is a great guy: joyful sense of humor, world traveler, proud father of
three. “There’s no getting over that, is
there?” I asked. “It’s a death
sentence,” Joe replied. Worse, it’s not
an easy way to go. The news silenced
me. I hadn’t known about the
diagnosis. What I did know was that
Bruce had recently walked a marathon with Joe and that they had signed up to
walk another one in the fall. He’s
living the life he has. On facebook,
someone had posted that Bruce is his hero.
Mine too.
Wednesday was a beautiful evening for walking: clear, cool,
with trees all covered in their tender new leaves, a green that only exists for
a couple of weeks mid-spring. Living
where we do, we have the blessing of seeing, repeatedly, mercilessly,
undeniably, that it’s OK to break down, to come to a halt, and to start anew.
Yes, Elena is one of my running role models. I’ll never achieve what she has because I’m
not starting with the same body, but what inspires me even more than her national-level
rankings is that she is setting marathon PRs in her 50s. I want to think that my best running years
might still be ahead of me. I’d like to
think that with time and determination and my love of running restored, I’ll
someday be able to keep up with more of my talented running friends (but not
Elena.) For now, though, I am content to keep walking. It makes my sprained back feel better: loosens
up tight muscles, helps me to straighten out my sore spots. More importantly, it’s been helping me
straighten out some things that matter more than muscles and ligaments.
Even when we were both running, Bruce was never faster than
I was, but it turns out that he, too, is one of my running role models. Yes, I’d enjoy being fast, but if I had to
choose one, I’d rather be courageous.
I’d like to know I could keep up with the winners, but rather than
lament what I am not, Bruce reminds me to live out the life I have. Eventually we will all slow down. Sooner or later, the bodies of even the
fastest runners will shut down, will crumble, will break. This needn’t be the case with the
spirit.
There isn’t anyone, fast or not fast, who doesn’t have to
live with mortality and make peace with it.
If you’ve been given a today, and if today you can still put one foot in
front of the other, at any pace, consider this a blessing. Enjoy the walk.
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