Running for Your Life: After Boston

My pal and original thinker Mike Tully http://bit.ly/hRtDDq has a thought about why it is that the older you get the faster time seems to go by. Coach Tully, who has made a close study of sports psychology (and is a high-demand public speaker on coaching, with an emphasis on athletic improvement), believes it may have something to do with the brain’s RAS, or reticular activating system.

As we age and get even more set in our ways (as most us do), our evolved RAS kicks in and our daily stimuli becomes so familiar that time appears to pass more quickly than it did when we were younger. (It is why, CT says, the drive home from an unfamiliar destination always seems noticeably shorter than the journey over foreign territory to get there. When you return, the course is known – it lacks surprise – and thus the time feels more compressed, even though it is virtually the same in physical length.)

In sports psychology, athletes whose brains are wired in such a way that they don’t fall into patterns of behavior in their play, but rather shake things up, treat a game situation as something new that they are reacting to, rather than one in which they respond to in some set way as established by our RAS, are the ones who stand out. We can do that in our own lives, of course. To override the RAS, zap that routine in a way that will actually make the appearance of time slow down. It’s worth a try, no?

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Funny, but every blog post until now has been influenced (infected?) by a race goal. I started Running for Your Life after doing much better than I expected in the Pittsburgh Marathon in May 2010.

I’ve never seen myself as a racer – rather as a runner. One who for health reasons (in order to keep a circulation impaired leg from getting swollen and causing me pain and discomfort) has been running every other day since late 1976.

In this blog, I’ve referred to these last two years as my version of a midlife crisis. For reasons that I won’t go into detail here, I’ve recently felt some solace in that interpretation . . .

This comes to mind because in the first eight days after the race I went out for a run only once – and then a barely sweating 1.6-miler on a indoor rubberized track. Even after all the training and the race itself, my left leg was back at because of my relative inactivity of those eight days. Without regular running it had swollen again. Not like the worst of it when I suffered two deep vein thrombosis attacks, during the first case of which my life was threatened and the second a terrible scare. But the swelling did remind me of why it is that I’d taken up running in the first place. For my health.

This is all getting to be too de rigueur, the running is good for your health stuff. If the “Born to Run” phenomenon weren’t enough, now The New York Times and The New Yorker are getting into the act with pieces on exercise and reverse aging, recently in The New York Times Magazine’s “All In Our Minds” issue, an article called Jogging Your Brain http://nyti.ms/HYxPMo, and most recently a Times Health columnn on May 1 by Gretchen Reynolds, “Like It or Not, Our Brains Are Enticing Us to Run.”

It seems folks are getting the message. A message that I’m going to be getting back to in this space while I sort out my next race goal: that it is enough to run. To follow me on the road, be it on a county trail, an indoor track, or the urban jungle. Come along, bring a friend.

Running for Your Life: Thurber Sketch