10 Lessons From 10 Years Of Running
Tin.
Wondering what precious metal or jewel represents your significant ten-year anniversary? It’s tin.
Bloody tin has to be up there for the least sexy anniversary material. Actually, cotton’s pretty crap too, but you’re only two years in at that point, so you have no idea.
But while it might show that I’ve been married way longer than 10 years, my running journey has just become a full decade old.
And though I have a memory like a sieve, I do know when and where I started running because it coincides with the birth of my youngest daughter. I wrote about it here, my origin story if you will.
Just When Things Were Looking Up
I haven’t really thought about running all that much in the last couple of weeks. I’ve had some lovely runs over the South Downs, near where I live but when I’m not training for something I often take my foot off the gas and allow myself to drift a bit. In this case, I’ve been turning my attention to strength training to counteract some of the effects of middle age.
So to stop myself from enjoying life too much, I’ve just entered the Brighton marathon.
My simple existence, free of troubling thoughts, will soon be packed full of obsession over fuelling, training plans, and what they were thinking when they created the texture for energy gels. IFYKYK.
The door to the pain cave will soon be prised open as the long road to marathon completion gets underway. I have done a marathon before. It was bloody awful.
But this time things will be different.
This feels like a bold claim coming from someone who’s sitting on the sofa in running gear, slippers and with a cat on her lap, and might technically be classified as some kind of fraud.
The thing is though when you run and keep running for a long time you do learn things and not just about running. You learn about yourself.
Now before you nominate me for some kind of Nobel award for really profound profoundness, here are 10 examples of what I mean. Once you reach the end, please let me know what you’ve learnt about yourself over your running journey, so I can marvel at your greatness:
1. Running alone is therapy: I am a lonely goat (yellow is the correct colour). I do like people I just don’t like running with them. I am with people a lot. I need to not be with them…a lot.
2. I’m not keen on spending time with my own thoughts: this makes me sound like a psychopath but it’s more that I don’t get that much time to listen to music and I LOVE music — particularly from the mid to late 90s, clearly the only decade that matters. Please leave your running tune recommendations in the comments.
3. Treadmills are not terrible all the time: one minute on a treadmill is about a year long but if you’re trying to run tempos or hills and need a bit of structure, they’re bloody useful.
4. Running is not about improving physical appearance: if you’re running to get skinny, you’re fresh outta luck. Reliable statistics* show that runners are 97.3% more likely to suffer from snaxidents, possibly multiple times a day.
5. You can’t wing long runs: some of us need more fuel than others, see above — be prepared.
6. You need a bit of variety: I’m not the boss of you but I reckon if you mix up trails, roads, and races you get to see the various sides of the sport and see what an absolute running legend you are under different conditions.
7. People will tell you all the time that you’ve lost your mind: you’re fine to ignore them, go ahead. Go to your happy place.
8. You’ll enter races and almost immediately get the fear: ride the brief wave of euphoria while you can and before reality comes crashing in on you. Sorry, buzzkill.
9. Expect your ability to change: it’s not always age-related, some days you just really find your flow, and other days it’s like having a conversation with Uncle Colm.
10. Running makes you a better person: you’ll become a better problem solver, grow more resilience than you ever thought possible and find out what you’re really made of at mile 19.
Now then, what have I missed? Oh yeah *those stats are guaranteed 100% not reliable.
