Thoughts On Running 12 Miles: Just Do It.

And now, I will put Michael J. Fox and Aristotle in the same blog entry:


"I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business." - Michael J. Fox, actor.

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." - Aristotle, Greek philosopher.

Agreed.

So on Saturday, I ran more miles than I ever have (at once) in my life: TWELVE MILES! Two days later, I'm still a little sore, but I feel excellent. And FYI, not only is strenuous exercise great for your body and your mind-->long-distance running is great for your sex life, too, especially if you want to spice it up and bring role playing into the bedroom: after running 12 miles, I make a great narcoleptic paraplegic!


A couple of months ago, my longest run was six miles. Right before I set out, I was a little frightened. But I did it. It wasn't too bad, and I was proud of myself. In the shower, I started thinking, "wait, I just did six. Soon, it'll be 12. Then I'll have to do 18. Then 20. . . " My excitement started to wither. My deliberation continued. " . . . and some people race the marathon. And then there are ULTRA-marathons. A hundred miles! Some people build rocket ships. And fly to the moon, or lead countries. Someone invented the computer. Someone else will be winning the Pulitzer. Six miles. Six miles?! Six miles is nothing!" . . .

I guess I was a little too hard on myself. I have a tendency to do that--to not recognize my accomplishments, but rather look ahead at what others have done and I have not. Is this masochism? It pushes me to NOT settle, but it also pushes me away from inner peace. My friend Doug somehow convinced me that if I continue thinking that way, I'll never enjoy anything. I'm trying to remind myself just to focus on what is happening at the moment. It's a work-in-progress on many levels.

I'm not the only person who feels this way:

I ran 5 miles today...tomorrow is my 12...it IS quite a quest! I am excited at the challenge. I have found that I enjoy the run more when I don't daydream and, instead, pay attention to the world around me or my body - ie, be more "mindful" and "aware"...but, just like when I meditate: my brain is constantly wanting to revert to daydreaming or thinking about the future or past. --Phil Ptacin

My dad ran his 12 yesterday (his recap is coming soon).

I ran my 12 on Saturday. Something happened during that run, something that took me by the shoulders and centered me into place. I'm not thinking of the future so much right now. I'm not thinking ahead, and I'm not dwelling on things I can't change, either.


Here's what I learned: The thing about running is that it's so easy. If you are not injured, if you have legs, arms, feet, toes and a torso that are all functioning okay, individually and together, all you have to do is RUN. (Even if you don't have all those things, like feet, there are ways around it.)

It's also so easy to not run. All you have to do is not do it. Or if you are running, just stop. It's THAT easy. You get tired, you get a cramp, it stops feeling good (rarely does it feel good to begin with), so you recognize the feeling as pain, and you stop.

What I learned about running 12 miles is that it's not much different than running 3: you either do it, or you don't. It gets hard, and you either keep going, or you stop. After a while, you get tired. You get hot. Thirsty. Bored. Tired. You get tired, then your tired gets tired. Then you dig into your energy reserves, run some more, and then your energy reserve gets depleted. Then you keep running. The hard part is when you dig deep for more fuel and you realize you've got nothing left. There's no reserve, there's just what you've got: legs, feet, arms, lungs, blood, and the road in front of you. So you either keep going, or you stop. It's that easy.

Mind you, this was my first 12 miles. It was hard, but I knew that if I didn't rock this one out, if I quit and took it easy when it got hard, the next time around would be just as hard, or even more difficult. If I didn't push through, it wouldn't get easier. At one time, 6 miles was overwhelming. Now 6 miles is like 3 miles.

Here's me, a total tool, before 12 miles. . .

Andrew ran the whole way with me. We looped Prospect Park, passing hot dog vendors, moms with strollers, other runners with their own pains and their own goals (and yes, many passed us, too). As tired as I got, my ego still came along for the free ride: when we passed a slower runner, I felt a false sense of accomplishment. ("Take THAT, slowpoke!") Sometimes, I felt self-conscious--like when the sweat that my thighs produced from rubbing together made it look like I peed my pants. I ran out of distractions: My ipod ran out of batteries. There were many kinds of uncomfortables that I felt: I had to go to the bathroom. I was too afraid to use the port-a-potty. I got cranky. I got bored. Sometimes, I'd fantasize that I was running from zombies. That if we stopped running, we'd die. It worked for a little.

At one point, maybe around mile 10, some random words from my subconscious popped into my head. I thought about the little boy in "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, who asks, "Are you carrying the fire?"

Carrying the fire.

Fire. Keeps humanity alive. An agent of destruction in the world. It is a destroyer; it is a life giver. In the barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland of "The Road" (and ahem, it didn't seem too unbelievable of a world, either), the boy and his father can either abandon hope and die, or live. Keep going. Carry the fire. They choose to live. In spite of the nearly impossible circumstances. It's as simple as saying "yes" or "no". To be, or not. And yet . . .

I got tired of trying to think. I stopped thinking. I had nothing left. All I could do is quit, or run. So I kept running.

My body hurt. But it didn't. My brain kept nagging me to quit, give up, stop running. And my legs would do whatever my brain told them to do. Inside my head, there was a constant battle going on between two voices: one, whining and insisting that I quit, and the other, deliberately ignoring the nagging demands.

So I kept running.

That's all I could do. Around mile 11, I remembered how I'd told Andrew a few hours before the run how I was excited to push myself past my limit, to feel what that feels like. But around mile 11, I thought about how stupid that comment was. My legs felt like they were full of cement. I didn't care to find out what my limit was anymore. I wanted to quit.

Then, we had just half a mile left. And most of it was up a steep slope. It felt like a beard could've grown faster than the speed of my run. All I could do was go one step at a time, nothing more. If I looked away from the road in front of me, I would loose all my drive. I stared straight down and inched along. I couldn't quit. I couldn't think of finishing. I just had to put one foot down then lift up the other up, put that foot down and lift the other up. My legs kept on going--they would do whatever I commanded them to do, but it was getting extremely hard to listen to that nagging voice inside me what kept telling my legs to quit. The other voice inside me needed something to hold on to, but I wasn't sure what to listen to. Then, I heard a gentle sound. It sounded like the ocean, it was a perfect rhythm, completely natural: breath. Breathe in, breathe out. It was a beautiful song. Everything became time-less.

I saw the finish line. My legs started to move faster. Elongated. I sprinted to the finish line. I felt like I was divided in three: my body, my ego, and my mind.

For the first time ever, I also experienced "Runner's High". I had heard of it before, and wasn't sure what it meant--happy to run? feeling good after exercise?"--until it hit me:

"I don't care about anything in the world!" I exclaimed to Andrew. I was so full of joy; I felt invisible. I felt like I was floating. Nothing could have swayed me or brought me down. There was no past, no future, just the present moment. Like we had a secret that no one else had. Like we were ghosts, watching our bodies and the rest of the world.

Yiannis Kouros, a legend in the world of Ultrarunning, once explained what he was feeling when he was running:

"Some may ask why I am running such long distances. There are reasons. During the ultras I come to a point where my body is almost dead. My mind has to take leadership. When it is very hard there is a war going on between the body and the mind. If my body wins, I will have to give up; if my mind wins, I will continue. At that time I feel that I stay outside of my body. It is as if I see my body in front of me; my mind commands and my body follows. This is a very special feeling, which I like very much. . . It is a very beautiful feeling and the only time I experience my personality separate from my body, as two different things."

One English teacher stated that during the last one and a half miles of the Ice Age Trail said, "[I] found myself running far faster than I had all day; I wasn't even conscious of my feet touching the ground as I crested the knoll ahead of the finish line. I wasn't running; it was as if something much larger than I was running me."

Testimonials above = runner's high!

Here's what I found on the interwebs about RH:


Runner's high is said to occur when strenuous exercise takes a person over a threshold that activates endorphin production. When the body is put under stress, the mind reacts accordingly and releases endorphins. Endorphins are any of a group of opiate proteins with pain-relieving properties that are found naturally in the brain. Through studies with athletes it has been found that endorphine levels increase with exercise.

Special interest arose in the possibility that elevated endorphin levels might explain the mood changes that occur during running, in particular the euphoria of the runner's high, and the increased resistance to pain that occurs during exercise. Pain can be described as a complex experience that involves a bodily response to a noxious stimulus followed by an emotional response to the event. In a sense, pain is a warning mechanism that helps the body protect itself from harmful stimuli. When a person is running they are putting their body under stress. When this happens, stress and pain occur, causing endorphin levels to rise in the brain. People's pain thresholds tend to increase directly following exercise such as a long-distance run and their moods are often elevated. An elevated endorphin level will then produce a mood change.

Throughout time, runner's high has been debated and there is still no general definition as to what it is, or even if it exists. I'll admit that back in the day, I did once or twice partake in consumption of a mind-altering substance, but I've never reached a high like I did on Saturday just by running. Did I reach that state because of the endorphins my body produced? Or was it more than that? Was it because that voice in my head/my ego ran out of things to latch onto, and for the first time in a very long time, I was in my purest form? Did all the thoughts and memories and desires and fears and filth that my mind has accumulated slip off me, and I just WAS? Did I reach some kind of enlightenment?

Here's me after 12 miles.

Perhaps.

But a couple hours later, I was sacked out on the couch, moaning slightly. My muscles were inflamed, I couldn't sit still and I didn't want to stand or walk. I ate a pasta dinner and a giant tub of ice cream (peanut butter chocolate, thank you very much), and was pretty much out of commission for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

But it was so worth it.




Tomorrow: four miles.