I ran today.
The weather in central New Jersey has been, to coin a phrase, unreliable. There was a high chance of thunderstorms all morning – which, it turns out, held off until early afternoon – and I didn’t want to get caught in a downpour as I battled traffic on a county road. So, I laced-up my running shoes and went for a run along the Lenape Trail.
It was a welcomed return to a sport that I love, but which I have neglected for almost a year. I used to be a runner – 30-40 miles per week, 10ks, half-marathons, marathons, trail running in the Middlesex Fells north of Boston – as well as a cyclist. Indeed, for a number of years, when I was legally blind and cycling outdoors on the roads around Boston and Chicago would have been suicidal (I will save that story for another time), I was almost exclusively a runner.
Running was safe; at times, I would do a big loop around one of the lobes of the Middlesex Fells Reservation in Malden and Stoneham, MA, only crossing three intersections (at the very least, I could see the difference between a red light and a green light), and often just running into the park from the trailhead on East Border Road. My vision was bad enough that I couldn’t quite see my feet five and a half feet below and, much more than once, I stumbled on the rocks and roots in the singletrack, often leaving behind tiny scraps of flesh and drops of blood for the woodland creatures.
One time, on a 12-mile road run, I took a wrong turn, as lo-viz (low-vision) people often do, and found myself deep in the westernmost lobe of the Fells, somewhere between the North and Middle Reservoirs. I came upon Brian Burke with his trail running friends in the wooded midday darkness. I asked for directions and Brian offered to guide me out to the sheepfold, from where I could find my way home. I don’t know if I ever told him how much that meant to me or how bad my situation really was. It is very possible that I owe Brian my life.
For all of the risks, running became a very important part of my life. I had begun running even before I seriously took up cycling. My father was a runner and, when I was around 12-years-old, I started joining him on his 5km and 10km training runs in Baie d’Urfé and Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec. I ran my first organized road race when I was 16, and I finally took some formal training in college and grad school. The half marathon was always my favorite distance – the 5k is a sprint, and marathons stop being fun at around 18 miles – and I made a point of doing at least one 13-mile (or more) training run every week.
I was also a committed cyclist, and my friends always asked why I didn’t try triathlons. Part of the answer was practical – I am a very poor swimmer and somewhat disinclined to learn – and part of it is that, in my mind, the two sports were, and are, fundamentally different activities. They are dissimilar experiences that offer different kinds of jouissance. Mixing them together like that, in a triathlon or even a duathlon, always seemed like too much of a mishmash omelet. I love pineapple, and I love pizza, but I don’t love them together, ya know?
Still, after a lot of years of road cycling, and a flirtation with mountain biking in my late-20s and 30s, I took to cyclocross as a masters racer and, wouldn’t you know it, that combines cycling with running (and carrying the bike) in a whole lot of mud. That could be why I love the sport so much – it plays to my two great joys, although the running parts are typically pretty short and invariably in the service of cycling.
I didn’t really have a choice for about five years. A close call with a truck in the western suburbs of Chicago made it abundantly clear that I could no longer see well enough to ride my bike safely. I transitioned from being a cyclist who liked to run into a runner who missed cycling, but I was making do and still getting that endorphin fix. I joined a running club, organized my training, and made peace with my lot by enjoying each step as an act of liberation. For the lo-viz, being able to go anywhere autonomously and in safety is a miracle of freedom, and running gave me that miracle five or six times every week.
Even after I regained my sight two years ago (also part of a longer story that I will share at another time), I continued to regard myself as primarily a runner who did some cycling for cross-training. I didn’t know the roads in Eastern MA well enough then to take chances on getting lost on a road ride and, besides, cycling can be a very expensive sport, particularly when compared to running, and I wasn’t prepared to get back to the level of commitment that I had in the sport before I moved to the United States in 2005.
I would continue to run; the bike would be a sideline.
That changed last spring. I pulled a calf muscle training for a spring marathon and, being of a vintage when ageing-in to a Boston Marathon qualifying time was looking promising (this is a thing), it took a long time for my mature muscle tissues to heal. I knew that I was going to miss my marathon and, what’s worse, my physiotherapist informed me that I wouldn’t be running on that leg for at least six weeks, although I could probably start doing some cross-training like “light spinning” with her permission after maybe less than a month. I don’t own a spin bike, and I hate gyms, so what harm would there be if I did my spinning on, you know, my road bike.
Last summer turned out to be the fifth hottest on record, with blazing temperatures and insane humidity. I remember coming back from a club run with the Run Club of Malden with my shorts sopping from sweat like a toddler’s diapers. Running anything longer than a 10k meant getting up at 5:00 am and out the door at 5:30 am to beat the heat before you could fry an egg on the Northern Strand. Running in the heat is both hard and very dangerous but cycling is lower-impact, and you create your own slipstream just by doing it. It is much easier and much safer when the going gets hot.
The pendulum swung, the balance shifted, and I was riding much more – out to places like Concord (45 miles round-trip) and Gloucester (61 miles round-trip) – and running less and less. I did my last run of more than six miles, a trail run in the Fells, on 19 September, and I strained my calf again on 23 October. I had planned one last kick at the can, a long lope through my beloved Fells before we moved to New Jersey in December but, to my everlasting regret, neither the weather nor packing cooperated.
Since then, I have tried repeatedly to restart my running, failing each time. While cycling and running are both endurance sports and demand an efficient aerobic engine, they have different muscular demands. Cycling primarily, but by no means exclusively, engages the glutes, hamstrings, and inner quads (the vastus medialis). Running engages many more muscles, both the inner and outer quads (the vastus medialis and the vastus lateralis), hamstrings, glutes, as well as the groin, and the front and back of the calves. What this means is that, if you are primarily a cyclist who takes to running, you will be using new, and often underdeveloped muscles.
Anyone who has started a brand-new training plan knows what it can be like to start flexing muscles that don’t normally get much of a workout; it hurts. That pain is the inflammation repairing the tears in muscle fibers that haven’t been overly exerted. The good news is that the inflammation is how we build muscles (we damage them just enough to build new tissue) and, over time, as they get stronger, the pain mostly goes away. My college running coach called them “transition pains” and said that they were “punishment for being a lazy ass and failing to keep diligently to consistent training.” He was a Scots Presbyterian, so this made sense to him.
The bad news is that, having not run regularly since last summer, I must endure this punishment every time I restart my running, and it is a strong disincentive to keep at it, since the “transition pains” are enough to keep me off the bike for a couple of days, and then I am disinclined to keep up with my running because it keeps me off the bike and… and… and… Well, you know.
But I have been feeling guilty about not keeping up with my running, and with one of my Strava friends running the Western States 100 ultramarathon this weekend, I was feeling the guilt particularly acutely today. I mean, I love cycling, and it has always been a big part of my life, but so has running – for longer, in fact. So, with my ride scrubbed because of the threat of thunderstorms (which did not materialize until the afternoon), I figured I’d start yet again, but slowly this time… with baby steps. I hope those baby steps will be what keep me going this time.
I know from experience that running makes me a stronger cyclist, though the reverse is not necessarily true. I also know that cyclocross season will be here sooner than I expect; I used to start training for the October mud at the end of July. Running will help with the run-ups, stairs, hurdles, and carries and maybe this old Yid on an old bike will be competitive again.
Most importantly, I had a blast, running in the on-again-off-again light drizzle for a little more than a half hour (I took it very slow). There was that sense of freedom and release with each stride, and a different kid of jouissance than I get from cycling. I need this, but more than that, I need to find that balance I had years ago, when running and cycling were the two sides of my athletic life. As the Buddha taught – though about sensual indulgence and self-denial rather than sports – I must find my middle path. And I think I caught a glimpse of it this morning.
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Photo: A blind man running in the Middlesex Fells, 2019.