Listening…

I’m a below-average runner, at best, even figuring in my age. On my best days, when everything is firing on all cylinders, I can approach, in terms of pace, the very low end of what everyone else I know seems to do as a matter of course. But I didn’t start doing this because I had any illusions of setting speed records.

I first started running to jump-start my fitness regimen. I had been dorking around with working out and wasting my trainer’s time for a few months. So I picked a 5K and trained for it. That is well-documented elsewhere. I stuck with running because of math. Although I had lost some weight, I was still pretty close to my peak. One day, I ran four miles. It took me about an hour, but I burned about 1,000 calories according to my watch. There was nothing else I was going to do that would burn 1,000 calories in an hour, so I kept going. (I’ve since gotten faster and lighter, so four miles burns a lot less now.)

I gravitated to longer runs and races because of my asthma. It’s counter-intuitive and I won’t try to explain it in detail here, but a 5K is actually harder on my asthma than a 10K. A half-marathon seems to be almost perfect. The longer runs give my lungs time to adjust before I need to kick. So far, no amount of pre-race warm-up has solved that for shorter races.

So I started running longer and I’ve always run slower. This all culminated with my first marathon this past October. Toward the end of training for the marathon, I was pretty gassed, as one would expect. About three weeks before the race, on what was supposed to be my last 20-mile training run, I rolled my ankle by stepping on a walnut that was obscured by some leaves. (Thanks, autumn!) I got off the trail at 15 miles and my taper pretty much became a hard stop.

It healed up and I did the race with the help of an ankle brace, which was probably more for the mental peace than anything. After taking some time off, I started my recovery routine. Almost immediately, I noticed some lingering tendonitis from the injury. I kept running slowly and with less frequency, but it still lingered, despite longer breaks between runs.

In mid-December, after a short run on a hotel treadmill, an unknown kidney stone decided to start its journey out of my body. The pain was excruciating and I didn’t want to experience it again, so I shut down running until it passed. By then, the holiday season was well under way, so I left my running shoes in the closet.

A funny thing happened during those weeks off — everything healed up. During that time, I spent more time at the gym, doing weight training, stretching, low-impact cardio, and anything else that would keep the stone happy until it passed. I was also on a pretty good load of ibuprofen to keep the inflammation down so the stone could pass more smoothly.

In other words, aside from the ibuprofen, I was doing everything I should have done after the marathon but didn’t. The reason everything healed up was because I was forced to finally listen to what my body had been telling me.

The end result was that, when I started running again in early January, my form was better — thanks to the leg work, stretching, core, and shoulder work. My posture had improved and my stride had opened up. I began noticing fatigue in my hamstrings and glutes because I was finally, after nearly two years, properly engaging those large muscles. And my pace had improved as a result.

One of the most important things I have learned through the process the last few years is patience. This recent episode taught me how much farther I have to go on that front. It shouldn’t have required a kidney stone to get me to listen to my body, but my residual impatience, and perhaps some lingering insecurity, kept me from listening to what I needed to hear.