What Are You Running From?

Not so long ago, in response to my telling him I had been running for the past two hours of the day, a friend responded with the ever witty, never funny, “Who was chasing you?”

I was reminded of that exchange this week when I happened to hear the story of Diane Van Deren, the ultra runner who started running to combat her seizures and whose surgery to remove the part of her brain that was causing those seizures took away her ability to conceive of the relative nature of time. Having no sense of the passage of time, Van Deren just keeps running. Those moments the rest of us have when our brains tell us we’ve run long enough, we’ve run too far, we have too far still to go, are completely foreign to her.

This got me to thinking about ultra runners in general. Are they simply programmed differently than the rest of us? The women and men who lace up the shoes and run 50 or 100 miles or more able to do so because of something in their brains that we just don’t have? Or is it something we have that they don’t? Many of the ultra runners I know, for example, are recovering addicts. Did their youthful transgressions chip away at a piece of their brains that would otherwise tell them to stop running at a reasonable point?

Not wanting to resort to heavy drug use or have part of my gray matter removed from my skull, I wonder if there is a way to train your brain to get into the zone Van Deren describes, where she only remembers the last few steps she’s taken and can only imagine the next few she will take.

And all of this leads me back to my friend’s not funny attempt at running humor. Evolutionarily we are all runners. We had to be, because the food was running away from us and things that thought we were food were chasing us.

I have a completely unsupported theory that says we are all running from something. Something is chasing us all the time, and that is why we keep going.

My most productive running period was during a particularly dark and challenging time of my life. I was very definitely running from the circumstances that were causing that darkness. I realize this is a very pessimistic take on distance running, and I realize that it would be just as easy to spin it as running to something rather than running from something, but I am curious about it. Were our ancestors running away from the predators or running toward the prey? Is one instinct more imperative than the other? Think about that for a minute. Are we more efficient, effective runners when we are being chased or when we are chasing? Tapping into the right instinct might help us be better runners. I, for one, hope that the answer isn’t  in the flight instinct, because I don’t want to have to sustain negativity in order to promote better running.

New Year: New Goals

Yours truly met a couple of his running goals this year. I finished an ultra, I logged more miles than last year (1,276 when this was written), and I stayed mostly healthy. Not bad.

Now I am faced with the new year and I need a new set of goals. I’m still developing my list, but I want your ideas to help me plan 2013. Follow me on Twitter @GregVanBelle or visit the Real Running page on Facebook and let me know what goals you would like to see me set and meet (or not) in the coming year.

Playing Hurt

In order to make the point I want to make this month, I have to first confess that I do sit around most Sundays with various friends and brothers in law watching American Professional Tackle Football*. Make of that what you will. On a recent Sunday the various dudes on couches in my living room watched as a kick returner got hit by about five men at the same time, and we cringed as we watched the replay of the runner’s ankle rolling over so far his shin bone was on the ground. I could almost hear the soft tissue tearing right through the screen.

The runner went down in a heap, and after they peeled the other team off of him, the trainers attended to him and carried him off the field. His team started their offensive drive without him. Five plays later, he was lining up as a wide receiver.

That same injury – minus the 250 pound linebackers beating me to a pulp – kept me out of running shoes for 2 weeks. A sore foot will sideline me for a week. Heck, even a bad cough can sideline my running plans. As I watched this player hobble back on the field with twenty dollars worth of athletic tape on his ankle, I started thinking about playing hurt and the decisions we have to make as recreational runners when it comes to pushing through pain or stepping back and letting our bodies heal.

As I get older I find myself listening to every little twinge or ache as I run. A little pain that I would have ignored ten years ago is suddenly cause for alarm, and it isn’t because I can’t take the pain. Like most distance runners, I am pretty good at gritting my teeth and working through pain. For me it is increasingly about longevity. I don’t need to meet my daily or weekly goal nearly as much as I want to be healthy for the whole year. And the year after that. So when I rolled my ankle on a tree root a few months back, I probably could have finished my planned ten miles, gone home, and suffered the consequences. Instead, I tightened my shoe, turned around, and walked the two miles back to my car.

How do we know when to stop? When to push? Which injuries have potential long term ramifications and which are just aches and pains? When do you see a doctor and when do you just surf the running message boards for similar symptoms? How many rhetorical questions can I write in one paragraph?

For the football player the lines are clearer and the decisions simpler. In fact, in most cases it isn’t his decision to make. The trainers tell him if he can play, and the coach tells him if he will play. Plus, chances are he has a few million bucks on the line.

Despite the differences, there is a model in the way football players deal with injury, however. For them it is all about game day. An injured player is held out of practice, given special training programs, and basically allowed to heal rather than practicing with his team. It’s all about game day.

This is all reinforcement for my theory that you should always have a race on the calendar. You should always be training for something, and that event should be the focus of your running energy. If you have a half marathon in two weeks and your knee hurts a little, back off a bit. Maybe take an extra rest day. Save yourself for the race. If you push in training and get hurt, the race is ruined. If you push in the race and get hurt, you just need a little longer to recover from the race than you otherwise would have.

It is also reinforcement for my theory that we all just need to be running more often than we do. The more time we spend on our feet, the more we learn which twinges and aches are serious and which are not.

*I should also confess that I purposely schedule my rest days on Sundays so I can spend the entire day watching football and obsessing over my fantasy football team.

It's All Connected

I write this with an icepack wrapped around my right knee. But I don’t remember ever hurting it. I didn’t twist it, I didn’t hyper-extend it, I didn’t land on it. I have just been running. So when the doctor asked what I did to it, I had nothing to say except that I have been running and one day it hurt.

She gave me a look that suggested she didn’t believe me and asked me to describe the three runs prior to noticing the pain. Nothing remarkable, I said. I nice long trail run, an easy afternoon of loops near home, and tempo run the morning I first noticed the pain and swelling.

She gave me that look again. She figured I was holding something back.

Then she started testing things. Twist, turn, bend, etc. Stand on one foot and do a squat.

She gave me the look again and started manipulating my ankles. No problems. My ankles don’t hurt.

“Are you sure you didn’t twist or roll your ankle recently?”

Well come to think of it, I sure did. On that long trail run. But it’s my knee that hurts.

“And you did it early in the run?”

Well, yeah. About halfway.

Her look changed. Now she was a disappointed teacher who clearly thought I understood anatomy better than I do.

Without resorting to a chart or singing that song about the bones all being connected, she treated me like the mental toddler that I can be and explained that in rolling my ankle early in the run, I transferred the stress to my knee, and likely favored my ankle for the rest of the run.

“Did your hip hurt after that run? Your lower back?”

Well…yeah.

“Your knee will be fine. You need to strengthen your ankle and your core. Call me in two weeks.”

This is a mistake I’m sure a lot of runners make. We get very strong and fit in one direction, with one set of muscles, often neglecting the rest of the body. So once I’m done icing this knee, I’m going to go to the gym instead of hitting the trails.

I hate the gym. I love the trails. You can see how I get myself into these situations.

Who Are You Kidding?

By now both of my regular readers know of vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s less than accurate assessment of his marathon performance. Real Running doesn’t want to be political, so I will leave Mr. Ryan’s case aside here. Sort of.

This came up with a colleague of mine a few years ago after the Seattle Marathon. He was skeptical of a friend’s claim of a 3:15:00 finish time and did a little digging. In pictures late on the course, his friend looked remarkably fresh compared the runners around him. And there was no finishing photo of him. I suggested he look at the split times or the finish times of the runners around him in the pictures. My colleague ultimately didn’t care whether or not his friend had cheated, but wondered aloud: why on earth one would fabricate a finish time in a marathon?

Dude, you’re the psych professor, you tell me.

All I can come up with on this front is that for so many people marathon training is a terribly public endeavor. Especially when training for our first 26.2, we employ family and friends. They support us, talk to us about running, and wish us luck on race day. So to fail would feel like you are letting others down. Otherwise what would be the point? Unless you are simply a pathological liar…which I suppose is always a possibility.

There is also another level to this. If you haven’t yet read the story of Kip Litton and his graduate-level marathon cheating, you should. I will link to it on my Twitter feed for both of you. Spoiler alert: When you fabricate an entire event, including fake runners, so you can claim a fast time, you might have a problem. See also: Donald Crowhurst. Seriously. Look him up.

In summary, there is no good reason to lie about a marathon time. Which leaves very few ways to explain why one would do so. Worse, it is a little disturbing that one would try to get away with such a fabrication in the technology-saturated running world we live in.

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @GregVanBelle, where I won’t lie to you about my training runs, injury status, race plans, and various other topics.