In Praise of Adventure Running

There are reasons I haven’t been writing.

Mainly it’s because I’ve been running.

Running is pretty much my life now.

Running?

I mean, apart from teaching, which of course fills up most of my life and has the most compelling stories attached to it. Unfortunately, we all know what happens to teachers who make grave errors in judgment and actually write about their students on public spaces like blogs and facebook …

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/education/story/1291477.html
(in case you don’t)

And then there’s Paul, with whom I spend as much time as humanly possible and with whom things are going wonderfully well, and oh my gosh we are in love and we have so much fun together and our relationship is so fantastic…

but I’m pretty sure reading about my relationship would make even my closest friends squeamish.

So all there really is to talk about is running, and I've read that reading about running is boring, so let me just apologize now because I'm sorry. It's all I've got.

I’m up to 30 miles a week now. I’m running so much that I think about running even when I’m not actually running. My google searches involve treatment of blisters and rehydration and “getting into flow” and what kind of socks don’t slide down inside your shoes after running for 180 minutes straight.

I spend hours and hours (and hours) on walkjogrun.com searching for routes of ever-increasing mileages.

It's just plain challenging to find a place you can run for 14 miles without getting bored (or hopelessly lost) (or run down by traffic) (or all three).

Last weekend, Paul (that’s the fantastic-relationship-Paul, the oh-my-gosh-we-are-so-in-love-Paul) went with me to Rock Hill, a town about an hour away where I had to take a 2-hour essay test for my teacher certification while he sat in the car grading papers.

Then we went on an adventure run.

I think adventure runs might be a way to take the boredom out of running. Adventure runs are risky because you are running in a new place, a place you have not experienced before. Often you can't map an adventure run on walkjogrun.com so you have to do a lot of guessing. You might get lost or it might, in some other way, not work out. You certainly can't count on a consistent pace or heart rate, the standard ways of assessing the success of a run.

And this is especially hard for someone like me. Committing more than six hours a week of my life to training is hard enough. Knowing that I have to get in a 14 or 16 or 18-mile run every weekend for 10 weeks makes me nervous. So it's pretty imperative that the long run go according to plan because it takes so much motivation and energy to just get myself out the door for those three-hour epics that even the slightest mess-up will throw off the entire training plan.

Instead of running, you could just as easily find me sprawled on the couch eating an entire package of Oreos while watching 12 hours of Law and Order Criminal Intent.

To say I have just the thinnest grip on my commitment to this whole stupid idea of running 26.2 miles is the honest truth.

We went to this place called the Greenway, a park with a system of 35 miles of trails. We did our 14-mile run on these twisting, turning, uneven trails through the woods. We got lost and we found our way anyway. At first I tried not to get my pretty Asics muddy; I didn't start having fun till I gave in to the bog. We got splattered and tired of suspension bridges. The first one was a charming diversion. We galloped and giggled across, trying to bounce each other with heavy footsteps. After half a dozen of these unstable, squirming traverses, I started to cringe when I saw one in the distance. On the last one, I think I could actually hear my calves screaming.

But Wow!

What a difference from running on the street. No exhaust, no car noise, NO MP3s! Not even a nanosecond of boredom. Just us and our total concentration, our total immersion in the experience.

Well, that, and the screaming of my calves.