Running Your Age

Sooner or later, usually sooner, every runner faces some variation of this question: why do you do it?

Why do you torture yourself? Why do you put up with those nasty black toenails and the technical shirts that smell like the floormats of a teenager’s Honda? Why do you get up at dark-thirty and spend an hour trudging around in the rain?

Here’s the thing about these questions: they don’t really want to hear the real answer. Anyone asking a question like that isn’t interested in the real reasons behind your passion. The person asking the question wants you to say something that is, in their minds, equally as crazy as your commitment to running in the first place so they can brush you off as insane and go about their day.

So don’t waste a second coming up with a good answer. There isn’t one. A good answer would poetically dig down and express the joy of effortless miles. A compelling answer would convey the beauty of a mile of winding singletrack with nothing but the sound of your shoes hitting the dirt. The best answer would make the questioner want to lace up the shoes and head to the track.

No such answer exists. I just shrug and say, “I don’t know. I guess I’m just crazy.”

Here are some other stock answers you might want to have pre-loaded for the next time someone asks…

“I’m part Kenyan. It’s just in my blood.”

“I’m not good at any other sports.”

“I’m staying fit in case I have to run from the cops.”

“I save a lot of money on gym memberships.”

“I just like to hurt myself. I’m into that. Wink.”

Then just walk away.

Every time someone asks me any variant of the “why do you run?” question, I do reflexively ask myself the same question. What’s in it for me? I think the simplest answer is that I run so I can eat whatever I want. That might be all there is to it.

However, once you get beyond basic health maintenance – which is for most the only reasonable excuse for running – what is the reason to keep going? Weight management and fitness only requires a few miles a day. So why does my training log show so many 60 mile weeks?

I don’t want to speak for both of you, but I have come up with a pretty decent answer, and it came to me on my 40^th birthday.

For no good reason, I decided that for this landmark birthday I would challenge myself to a mile for every year of my life. 40 for 40. Try explaining that to your family and friends.

It was during my (failed) attempt at 40 miles on my 40^th birthday that I finally figured out, for me, what this running thing was all about.  We have established that I will never win a race. I will likely never be faster than I am now. I have no extrinsic motivation to lace my shoes and run.

Maybe it is just a variant of the classic mountain climbing excuse “because it’s there,” but when I filter out every other possible motivation to keep running, I do it because I want to see what this old body can do. I run distances because I can. And I want to see just how much I can do.

Human endurance is an incredible thing, and in the western world, we live largely free of circumstances that require us to really use it. We read remarkable tales of survival and sea or in the mountains, and they are remarkable precisely because they are so rare. 

I don’t want to be stranded in the mountains (been there, done that) or adrift in the ocean on a dismasted yacht. But whatever force gets people through those situations is precisely the force that makes me want to see just how far my legs can run. It’s a survival instinct that I hope to never have to actually use.

It’s that force that took me around my first marathon course, and it’s why I found myself at the Redmond Watershed recently in an attempt to run 40 miles on my 40^th birthday. I came up short with an injury, but I’ll be back next year. 41 for 41.