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Running. That’s a lot art to me. Ever since discovery the joys of cycling (serious cycling, not the simple pedal pushing I was doing years before), I haven’t looked back at running. The reasons I gravitated to cycling were:

• easy to get started
• had a friend with which to partner
• data from rides was plentiful and easy to gather
• improvement came quickly

The reasons I drifted away from running:

• difficult to maintain a level of fitness which made running easy
• improvement came slowly
• knee pain (not much, but enough to be yet another excuse to not go out)
• little data collection involved (pretty much time and distance–I didn’t have a heart rate monitor yet)
• no social involvement

So today was my first run in years. I was apprehensive about it. Would it be painful? Would me knees hurt just as before? Would I be out of breath quickly? Turns out, it wasn’t that bad. No pain, even in the knees. Cardiovascular system felt fine (though I forgot to put on my HR monitor, doh!). The only negative part was how different it felt from cycling.

Ah, cycling. My true training love. How I can just float along for hours and grind away miles upon miles. My greatest ride, as I’ve bored you with before, was my 24 hour event this past July. It was brilliant. Exulting. My greatest physical achievement. I want to do it again and again.

So why on earth would I want to reopen the door to the Running Room? Variety. New goals. I ran in high school and college, and while I gravitated towards longer distances, I never really pushed myself to run LONGER distance. Twelve miles is the furthest I’ve ever run. Twelve. Seems so utterly puny next to the 351 I rode in 24 hours. Yes, they are two entirely different animals. But still. Twelve? And this was at the, arguably, height of my physical fitness in high school track.

Bob Dunkleburg and I turned to Coach at the start of Sunday morning’s over-distance day and said “we feel good, what have you got for us?” He smiled and said, well, you can do the Rock Island run. A local 8.3 mile event in town. “Nah, we’ve done eight plenty of times… More!” He mentioned another slightly longer run of 9 or 10 miles. We still balked. Then Coach said jokingly, “Alright, you could run out to the Fowler school and back. That’d be 12 miles.” And so it was. Twelve miles in 1 hour and 24 minutes. Coach had to borrow a bike from some kid to check on us. We ran well and consistently. I do remember having to switch sides of the road a few times because of mild pronation problems in my ankle (due to the significant crowning of the road we were on). But other than that it was brilliant. Bob and I had accomplished something great.

Fast forward about 10 or 12 years. Now I’ve long since lost any fitness of yesteryear. I’ve put on enough extra pounds to feel it and start to long for the mid-run and post-run feelings I so fondly remembered. A rudimentary running regimen starts and miraculously I make it back to… wait for it… here it comes… 11 MILES! Pretty close to that 12 in high school. Pretty amazing, I’m thinking. But somehow even that achievement wasn’t enough to keep me going and my running jones died like leaves in the fall.

I alluded to new goals earlier. I’m still formulating them and perhaps won’t even have them solidified for another month or two. I want to make sure the knees aren’t going to be an issue first. So no disclosure yet. I’m sure for at least a few readers out there familiar with the path cycling has taken me it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to figure out what I might be thinking running-wise. But I’ll leave it to conjecture at the moment. I’m sure I’ll still do about 5,000 miles in the coming year, heck, if I do the John Ceceri series, that along will be over 2,100 miles. Just in in SEVEN events! This year, I’m coming in at just a smidge under 5,000 (hopefully 4,900… we’ll see what kind of miles I get in on Sunday).

Oh yeah, the stats… I did 2.15 miles in 22:04 at a pace of 10:14. That’s a woefully low pace… too long a time, but respectable distance. How’d it feel? Well, earlier I said I could float along for hours on my bike and compared to running, float IS the operative word. Running felt heavy. Not heavy like theories by Locke and Rousseau. Heavy as in “does my body really weigh this much?” Each step meant I had to lift and propel forward my entire weight. BY MYSELF! Good grief. No assistance? Cycling spoiled me. And for that reason, I’ll never give up cycling.

This entry was posted Sunday, December 31st, 2006 at 10:42 am and is filed under Running. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.