A Running Story
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Anyone who has ever considered themselves to be a runner (or at least to be someone who sometimes moves faster than a walk) has a running story. How you got started, why you kept going, why you stopped, that time you set a personal best, the route you ran in college that you miss badly, the pain, not wanting to, hating it and loving it. I’d like to share my story, my plan for adding to it and hopefully inspire you to share your story or start one.
Fast is relative
I grew up in Kingston, Jamaica from the age of 1 to 16 and if you know anything about Jamaicans you probably know that they consistently win track and field medals in the Olympics. Imagine growing up in a country where track and field is one of the top national sports. Needless to say I never looked forward to “Field Day”. It was obvious to me at an early age that I was not going to be a track star, not because I bought into the stereotype of why I’d be slower than the other kids, mostly because I was factually slower. Notwithstanding I was always active, playing soccer (football), volleyball, and hiking up and down all kinds of tropical hills and mountains. I thought running wasn’t my thing and, other than sports, didn’t plan on doing much of it.
Then the US Air Force called during my senior year of high school (we moved to the US) to let me know that I had received a full scholarship to study electrical engineering at Mississippi State University! Oh and by the way, you have to pass a Physical Fitness Test (PFT) your first day of Freshman year in order to qualify. This didn’t really register with me as a problem since I was soo active. Boy was I in for a rude awakening at 6 am my first day of college. Back then the PFT was pushups, crunches and a 2 mile run. I had never been so nauseous but I managed to pass. Time to get a little more serious about this running thing.
The Accident
For the next 3 years of college my running was fairly consistent, never longer than 3 miles at a time, always a steady pace of around 9 mins per mile. Then one night it ended painfully. A part of me still thinks that if I had not gone for a run that night that maybe it wouldn’t have happened, but who knows. I had just returned from a summer internship in California, my body on Pacific time and the first PFT of the semester the next morning. Genius decided to go for a run at 11:30pm to train. I have vivid memories of that run, how humid it was, what I was wearing, the route I took, even certain things about the way the sidewalk looked. It was the first time I ran that route and the last.
When I got back to the house all my roommates were already asleep, I jumped into the shower, turned off the water and was stepping out to grab my towel when I saw it. The large mirror on the wall over the sink started to fall. All I could do was pull up my left leg and hunch over in an attempt to make myself smaller. The mirror making impact with my left shoulder, shattering, the largest piece breaking off, falling behind me and slicing into my right achilles tendon. Pain, blood, and a towel.
Physical Therapy; a wolf in sheep’s clothing
Physical Therapy was hard, painful and slow. The therapist treated my scar like she hated it, her vitamin E massages were not looked forward to. Yet in my belly was a need to be back, to be running, to not be limited. I only cried a little bit when she reached for my ankle. It was probably a mix of fear and wanting that thing you can’t have anymore that motivated me to do my exercises at home. Eventually getting to where I could walk without a boot, and then some weeks later a slow jog that lasted about 4 minutes. Victory! A reason to truly want to run and boy did I get my fill soon enough.
My training/rehab consisted of trying to run for two miles 3-4 times a week for a total of around 6-8 miles a week. My pace was nothing special, but I was also being very timid. Worried I’d push myself too far too fast, I kept it around 9:30 minutes per mile for quite a long time. I still wish that I had done a better job of documenting the progress I made with my mile times, but you never think about those things in the moment. By the end of the semester I had to take another PFT for the Air Force ROTC to keep my scholarship, passing it with my pace approaching the 8:30 mark. I felt fairly good, I wasn’t going to be too limited. Yet now I had a constant reminder that I wasn’t the way I used to be, the tendon had a large amount of scar tissue and I had to stretch it out many times a day to keep the tightness away. I felt like I had more to prove.
#ThatSummer
The following summer I had the good fortune of heading back to California for a second internship at a research lab named Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This summer was that summer for me, I hope you’ve had a that summer. It was mine for many reasons, many of which stemmed from me doing some serious proving. Some highlights: Climbing Mount Shasta twice in one week, down hill mountain biking and swimming in the cold clear water of Lake Tahoe, trips to Yosemite to rock climb and hike trails next to waterfalls, trying to get onto the roof of as many tall buildings in San Francisco as we could in one night, surfing Half Moon bay, playing soccer with South Americans and Mexicans and subsequently learning some Spanish. But my absolute favorite memory is running the San Francisco Marathon.
Oh, is there a Marathon this weekend?
We heard about the marathon on Tuesday, bought better running shoes on Saturday and ran the marathon on Sunday. True story. I have previously written about that story in a post about how I and a friend ran a marathon without any training. That post generated some interesting discussions. Over 100 comments, 360 tweets, features by the BBC and Lifehacker, and visited over 50,000 times.
One of the interesting things I learned through discussions about my experience was that there is a large segment of runners who think it is Not OK for someone to run a marathon without training. In fact it upset quite a few people that I would do such a thing and then tell others about it. I somewhat concede to those who were bothered by the fact that I took ibuprofen before the race, because it’s not a great idea. However, my point was not to prescribe a plan for someone to do what we did, I was merely telling a story about what we did. A running story.
A new love
After college I was commissioned in the Air Force as an officer and so of course had to continue being fit for battle. Now that I was a working man I suddenly had a ton of free time that I didn’t have in college (engineering degree). I used my free time to begin figuring out how to be a better runner. I tried all kinds of different training routines, I met Jeff Galloway of marathoning fame/infamy, and got to tell him I used his technique without knowing what I was doing. Jeff was an Olympic marathoner and is a huge proponent of what he calls the RUN WALK RUN method. This is essentially how I was able to finish the San Francisco marathon without training, I just didn’t know it was actually a real technique. Since I wasn’t planning to do another marathon anytime soon I adapted this method to an interval training system that I tweaked over the next few years. This program allowed me to dramatically improve my PFT times, 5K times (Best 5K time of 21:13 at a 6:49/mile pace) and dramatically reduce the amount of time it took to get it all accomplished.
Seriously?
Then one night my two roommates Robert and Dave and I were sitting on the front porch and we decided, along with a friend named Brian, to run the Las Vegas marathon that December. Great Idea! We had about 5 months to train for it and planned to do it right. I started to train, this time I was going to do more running than walking though I planned to still incorporate walk breaks into my strategy. A serious training plan, upping milage and coming back down, all the good stuff they tell you to do. I had recently done an 18 mile run and two 16 mile runs, then the week of Thanksgiving I went for a 13 mile run, came home, got ready to host a dinner party, put on my shoes, stood up and dislocated my fifth metatarsal in my right foot. This is the bone that your pinky toe is attached to. Yes, it hurt really bad. I was out of the race. That injury plagued me for over a year and was eventually part of the reason I almost quit running altogether. Over the past 4 or 5 years I have run around 10 times. Until a few weeks ago.
Where have you been old friend
I’m tired of not running, it’s this part of me that I miss a whole lot but have found every excuse in the book to avoid. My foot is fine, yes I notice the achilles tendon, always, and the fifth metatarsal threatens me every once in a while but they aren’t really stopping me. What’s been stopping me is that running is hard, it’s time consuming, it’s hot, I’m tired, I don’t have time, the neighbors are watching, I’m slow, I’m scared, I don’t have new shoes, my iPod is dead, the list goes on.
Some of that you just have to get over, some of it you can work around. So my plan for becoming a runner, again, is to go back to my roots, find that sweet spot of short runs that get the heart going but that I can still easily fit into a schedule of wife, kids, church and work. It’s time to get rid of some of my excuses, some of which are stupid, call myself out when I’m being a coward, know where my limits are and get back out there.
What about you?
So that’s what I’m doing and I want to help you too. If you want to join me on this journey I’m thinking about writing about it in more detail. I’d love to share more about what my actual nuts and bolts strategies are for becoming a runner again, the ups and downs of it all. If you want to chat you should email me at andrew@siftedwheat.com or find me on twitter @gertig.
That’s my running story, I’d love to hear yours!
