Catswamp

I’ve been training well, and last Saturday I raced a 5-miler. It was an experiment. It’s been decades since I’ve been fit enough to lay it out there and actually compete rather than just staggering along. I was flat out. It felt good.

Being exhausted after a hard run when you’re in decent condition is an entirely different thing than being exhausted when you aren’t. The second is horrible in every imaginable way: physical, emotional, spiritual—you name the dimension. The first, on the other hand, hurts, but at the same time is profoundly satisfying. It’s the opposite of masochistic. You’re deeply, absolutely weary, and utterly empty, but it’s the fatigue of strong, functional parts. You feel used but not abused. And I now know that if you’re old, you also experience some pleasant artifacts of youth. Efficient breathing patterns. Solid rhythms of movement. A certain lightness.

It’s taken me three days to fully recover, but—I’m recovered. No pulls, strains, dents, dings, or aggravated whatnots of any kind. For which I credit primarily time in the gym with a great personal trainer. Liz understands what I’m after and has gotten me strong and loose and balanced enough to train and race without injury.

I plugged my time into one of those race conversion programs, which tells me that given my time for 5, I should be able to run a single mile in 7:06. My goal for the summer is 7-flat, so I’m chuffed.

I’ve been 70 for a couple of weeks now. The downsides include the old man’s existential confrontation with time and inevitability, disappearing short-term memory, and the onset of Raynaud’s disease, which makes my fingers turn almost comically white and go numb when the weather turns even a little chilly. The upsides are lots of love, a spectacular family, both nuclear and extended, great friends, freedom to travel, and a general level of physical health and fitness that astonishes and delights. Post-Mayo, I’ve changed my diet and lost vast blobs of flab.The gym has made me stronger and more flexible than I’ve ever felt. And the wonderful rhythmic swing of running, my great joy, goes well when the weather permits. According to my cool Garmin gizmo, my resting heart-rate these days is in the low 40s. I’ll take it.

I’ve always liked this, from the great Peter Snell: “When it’s pouring with rain, and you’re bowling along, wet-through, in the dark, there’s a satisfaction just in knowing you’re out there and the others aren’t.”

Pretty much every runner who’s ever trained to race can relate, either as the the guy on the move or as one of “the others,” knowing he should be on the move.

For me these days, “the others” are irrelevant, but I have been feeling profound satisfaction staggering along out there in the cold. Satisfaction in the form of gratitude. Gratitude for this:

“Patient with a history of advanced prostate cancer now off hormone therapy,
doing extraordinarily well.”

Thank you, Mayo Clinic. Thank you, Dr.Kwon.

Happy New Year, everybody.

It was a wonderful, warm pre-dawn today, with a big waning moon and a beautiful morning star. And my run was virtually pain-free for the first time in a couple of months, even on a some gentle hills.

My trainer Liz had moved me over from mostly strength and general flexibility to a specific set of stretches that I find challenging but that seem to have worked really well, along with a sort of massage move—it uses a door hinge!—suggested to me by H’s PT Kristie that hits the inside of my achilles. I won’t be ready to try running even moderately fast for a good while yet, but just shuffling along getting a little of that good rhythm going is a treat. The fact is, I’m a pretty happy guy when I’m fit to run, and a pretty miserable one when I’m not.

Many years ago, someone who knew me very well enlightened me about myself when I was undergoing the tortures of English grad school. “Look, you’re smart. But you’re not an intellectual. You’re basically a physical guy.” Which saved my sanity by exploding me out of the grim seminars that had already seemed to suck all the life out of literature and were beginning to do the same to me.

I went to work at McDonalds. Then in a textile factory. Then as a gardener and general dogsbody on a rich family’s estate. I wasn’t happy at McDonalds, but I rather enjoyed the rest.

At the same time, I started running again, training with an ultra-marathoner whose races were 50-milers and 100Ks. (He’d go 10 or 12 on a short day, I’d go 6 on a long.) And as I gradually rediscovered my sport, I also learned from the other guys out there that my shins no longer had to scream. I learned about “running podiatrists,” who could prescribe and fashion these things called “orthotics” to put in your training flats. And better yet, someone had invented good training flats!

It turned out my problem wasn’t anterior compartment syndrome, requiring surgeries I’d declined to have, but simply a mechanical imbalance now easily corrected. I was in clover. Somewhat underemployed, but happy as a clam.

And now I could run pain-free. I’d also learned a lot more about training. So I ran long/strong lactate-threshold workouts every day and easy-go longer runs on Sunday. High-mileage weeks. And I raced only during short periods when I’d sharpened to a peak. The pure Lydiard. Results weren’t big-time or profoundly impressive, but as I’ve written somewhere else, I would have kicked my own ass in what was supposed to have been my prime. Which made me happy. And this morning has made me hope happily for the old-guy version.