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kfitz

Running

I’ve had an on-and-off romance with running for nearly 20 years now. I came to it late; I hated running as a kid, and I avoided it as much as I could in high school. And given that on the one hand I was pretty notably underweight until my mid-20s, and on the other, I grew up in a time and place that hadn’t yet been touched by things like girls’ soccer teams, nobody really forced me to think about anything like exercise. I joined a gym here and there; I took the occasional aerobics class. Never anything with any focus.

Until I went back to grad school. For some reason, that first semester at NYU I got serious. I went to Coles (which I recall being pretty shiny and new then) and took a prescriptive fitness class, where I learned a few basic things about exercise and was supervised through a range of circuit training programs. I remember spending a lot of my cardio time on a stair climber, until one of the instructors stopped me one day and said “mix it up a bit, Kathleen!” So I got on a treadmill and ran a mile in 10 minutes — the first mile I had ever run in my life. I was 26.

And I was hooked. R. and I started running together whenever we could. I was way slower than he was, always, but he pulled me along and got me to do more than I thought I could. And I ran by myself, too: endless tight little laps on Coles’s roof track, at first, and then once I moved to Hell’s Kitchen, early morning loops of lower Central Park. Those years, I was probably in the best physical shape of my life, and it was clear that the running was helping keep me on an even keel through the craziness of grad school.

But, being a grad student, I let the running gradually come, like everything else to be about Accomplishment. There’s nothing wrong with that, at least in the abstract, but it did something to the experience for me. It drove me to do more and more, well past the point at which I really should have just let myself settle into a more meditative routine.

In 1997, as I went on the job market, moved into high gear trying to finish my dissertation, and took on a full-time load of freelance work, my number came up in the lottery for the NYC marathon. And so I added training for that race to my schedule.

The marathon itself was amazing, though I ran it about half an hour slower than I’d hoped (partly for reasons out of my control; partly because of some less than optimal choices I made). It was an astonishing day, though, and I have no regrets whatsoever about the marathon itself. Training for the marathon, however, was another story. For months, I got up well before dawn to go run before settling down to work. I gave up hours and hours during the week, and pretty much a full day on the weekend, to running. And everything hurt pretty much all the time — not from an injury, just that overstressed, overused, constant ache.

I recovered slowly after the race, and gradually got back to a more normal level of running. Sort of. Something about all of those hours made me kind of dread running, and so once I graduated and moved to Claremont and started the business of being an assistant professor, I gradually… just… stopped.

Which is when the running dreams started, I think. I’d have these incredible dreams about running very strange race courses — across cities, in buildings, down stairs, through stores. Or I’d start running to try to catch someone, and just keep going. In my dreams, I was fast, and I felt great. A little nudge from the unconscious, I think, saying “don’t you want to feel this again when you’re awake?”

So I did gradually pick the running back up again, but wound up following the same cycle: ran well and felt great; ran more and felt better; decided to see if I could run another marathon. That one was Los Angeles, in 2005, and again the race itself went super well. And again, all the running before and after, a bit less so. I blew out one of my arches due to all the overtraining, and wound up with orthotics, which I never really got the hang of running with. And gradually, again, I stopped.

I picked the running back up a bit during my sabbatical a couple of years ago, but things started hurting again, and so I backed back off, trying to find my way to something that would be enough. Since then I’ve done some yoga, and a bunch of walking, but nothing has felt quite as good as running at its best has felt. And if I actually get to move into the apartment that I’m hoping I’ll be moving into soon, I’m going to have amazing access to another amazing park, and I want to be able to take advantage of that.

So I’m back at it, running again. And I’m trying to get myself to think about “enough” on the front end, as I’m starting up, rather than when things begin breaking down. I’m nearly 20 years older than I was when I ran that first mile, and I weigh a fair bit more, and things just don’t work quite like they used to. I eased my way into running this time with a lot of walking, and then slow short running intervals, gradually increasing them until I could run continuously. I’m a couple of months in, and it all feels pretty decent — nothing hurts, and I’m recovering from my runs well.

But I’m slow. What used to be my steady training pace is now my all-out intervals pace. I can feel my younger selves sneering at what my steady training pace has now become.

I remember telling R. years ago, in those early running days, that the key aspect of discipline for me was less about the need to make myself go do something than it was about the need to keep myself from doing too much. And so I’m trying to be very disciplined about things, to build strength slowly, to keep plodding forward, to focus on the years ahead rather than the miles right now.

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