Running for Your Life: Over the Hump

When it comes to marathons, you never know, but with fewer than six weeks to go before the big day (Sunday, July 27, Barrington County, Nova Scotia), so far, so good.

What I’ve come to know about running in marathons (completing five) since I began this relatively crazy pursuit is that it predictions are of little merit.

Suffice to say that for this race I’m pretty much on schedule. Long runs? I did run for going onto three hours three weeks ago in Barcelona, a city of beaches where I loped along the Mediterranean to a development known for its giant solar panel, along a boardwalk with a slew of nightspots and pier prix-fixe seafood restaurants out toward a patio-stone esplanade (pretty much empty of runners except for the occasional clutch of American ex-patriots who I swear exult “USA! USA! USA!” as they fist-pump along in red, white and blue bandanas) and on to the spinnaker-shaped W Hotel, then back to Olympic Park Village, named for the wondrously strange failed Catalan utopia of Icaria, to Ciutadella Park where the minstrels and jugglers and gymnastic partners and piñata-punishing children delights as the tourist with a touch of class wend their way for hours in the waning sun.

Those seventeen miles went by relatively easily; it’s flat in that part of Barcelona, like the Nova Scotian coastline I’m be running along in six weeks, similar again to my next long run and walk, a minimum of eighteen, out along the Hudson River Park in Manhattan planned for Thursday (June 19); I’m training differently this time, with intermittent one-minute walk breaks because at fifty-eight it seems advisable, especially given the title of this blog – Running for Your Life – and I’d like to not repeat my experience in Steamtown last October, which wasn’t a fun time. At the sixteen-mile mark I started to break down and the next ten miles, well … Not pretty. Am hoping this easier training regimen will make it better for me. But as I said, you never know. You just gotta get out there, get the miles in ….

Next: Running for Your Life: Treadmill Time 

Running for Your Life: Road Warriors

Runners are weird. Deeply. If we miss, say, two days in a row we’re not fit for human company. Or dogs, for that matter. Cats, sure. Cats don’t give a shit. They’ll hang with ax murderers.

So imagine how I felt Saturday when on a loping run in party-choked Prospect Park my right foot landed awkwardly on a root and twisted under my full weight so that for a millisecond all that force came down on the outside bone/muscle of my ankle. I winced with terrible pain that shot up my leg and – kept on running. For another three miles.

Not a good idea, right? Still, after about forty years of running you learn a thing or two. Or hope you do. Hope that your body keeps healing like it has pretty much from the beginning.

Like a quality car that gets road time and good maintenance, a well-conditioned and fed body can take a beating and keep on shining. As a driver we know how far we can push that car, in my case a late-model Volvo. It will be taking K and me to Canada next month for the sea views of the running events during the Nova Scotia Marathon in Barrington County.

Runners, crazy runners, know what we can get away with. In my case, my ankle ballooned with a sprain. My wife was alarmed with the sick look of it. It was wrapped with ice when I called the Belmont Stakes winner (Tonalist – I don’t bet, but in the prance to the starting gate I do have a knack of calling long-shot winners). The next day I wrapped the ankle with gauze tape and danced the night away at the wedding of beloved young friends, iced it again on Monday before work and on Tuesday (June 10), I ran and felt no pain. The base of the foot is black and blue but the swelling is down – and I loped for thirty minutes and felt great while making these track notes.

To run a marathon is to adopt this mentality.The road warrior mindset. No one can train for a marathon without pain. It happens. And unless we break bones in essential limbs, we keep going. That’s the nature of this beast of a task: covering 26.2 miles in the most efficient, and least body-breaking way.

Next: Running for Your Life: Over the Hump