Running Ruminations

There’s this saying that “running isn’t cancelled” during the pandemic, which I have interpreted differently at various points in this forty-six+ week catastrophe we’re all living through. 

Depending on where you call home, running has probably looked very different than before: in some places, high school or collegiate teams have been allowed (or forbidden) to practice or compete; in others, some road or trail races have gone on, with COVID modifications or “safeguards” in place; and at various points in the pandemic, at least around here, some local running hot spots, like tracks and parks, have even been closed to mitigate community spread. 

So many runners are itching to get back to racing because for many of us, racing is part of our running equation. Sure, we may love the sport with all our heart, and our daily sweat on the run may feel as essential as oxygen, yet if we’re being honest, many of us are also extrinsically motivated to show up every day because we’re working toward a race-specific goal: destroying a PR, covering a particular distance for the first time, whatever. 

With many traditionally-run, in-person, mass-gathering type of races offline for the better part of a year now, getting out the door every day can be really hard, even for the most devoted among us. That’s not to say that extrinsically-motivated running is inferior to its intrinsic cousin; it’s simply an honest assessment that some days, it’s hard not to say F it, what am I doing this all for and just bag it before we even begin because there’s not really anything on the line, so to speak. 

Running because we can, because we are fortunate to be in good enough health that will allow it and to have the privilege of time to do it, is beautiful and important and obviously a gift to be cherished … but we’re humans. Some days, in the past forty-six weeks, at least for me, running has been meh, not bad, not good, just there, a placeholder, an item to check-off the list each day. 

I began this little run-streak on March 9 probably out of a desire to maintain some sense of control (and a shade of normalcy) during the pandemic but also because I knew that even without any races on the calendar, continuing to run and “train,” even “for life,” would be beneficial to my health.

To be sure, some days it has been extremely hard to show up — especially if I’m tired, or I’m sore, or the weather is sub-par, or whatever — and I’ve put off my morning run until some later time in the day, which more often than not makes it incredibly hard to fit in and just annoys me, but it’s important enough to me that I’ll still go do it. 

Keep the thing, the thing, and just do the thing, right? It’s as hard as we make it.   

For most of the pandemic, given that there are no races to be had in these parts (and I’m unwilling and disinterested in non-essential interstate travel during an airborne, respiratory pandemic), I’ve had very little interest in going HAM in any virtual racing challenges, though I’ve been happy to participate to support the small biz organizing them and lollygag my way through it.

Sometimes these silly little challenges have been enough to get me out the door, which I can certainly appreciate when I’m having myself a day. (That, and the fact that I don’t want to quit on the streak simply because one day I felt like I don’t wanna.) It’s like this promise, some commitment, that I’ve made to myself.  

At any rate, for the past couple months, interspersed in all the vanilla miles was the smallest sprinkling of faster stuff. It wasn’t until the end of 2020 that I began mile training, and from Halloween until last weekend, we (friends Lisa, my lovely coach and Wolfpack leader extraordinaire, and Janet, my forever-pacer on the track) got my time down from 6:15 to 6:08, which, admittedly, felt really good and like a sense of accomplishment. Not gonna lie: I was thrilled.

I’ll likely continue this mile project for a bit longer because at this point, why not? It’s low-hanging fruit; it’s something I’d probably not pursue in normal times because I choose to marathon train, more often than not; and you can’t beat the recovery time, compared to the longer distance stuff. 

Plus: it’s fun to run fast and try to get to that point where all you can think is it’s on. Shooting for something sub-6 and more audaciously (and arbitrarily), 5:4x, sounds like fun right now, especially since marathons appear to not be in the immediate future…

…except that that’s not exactly true anymore, depending on your definition of “immediate.” hm.

I think many of us are in this weird place regarding racing and looking forward to all of it returning but not necessarily knowing when or how it would (should, could) look right now or in the soon-ish future or how we feel about participating in it. 

I mean, just this week, the BAA announced that an October 2021 Boston Marathon is in the works, contingent on a bazillion variables. Never before have two World Marathon Majors been on consecutive days — if it happens, Chicago will be on its usual Sunday in October (10/10), with Boston on the following Monday (10/11) — and this all on the heels of London earlier in the month (10/3), with 50,000 in-person runners and another 50,000 virtual, as it goes for a Guinness record. Plus, there’s Berlin on its usual late-September date (9/26) and Tokyo, usually a February race, on 10/17. NYC, if it happens on its usual first Sunday in November, remains to be seen, particularly if it’ll even publicly advertise an attempt at an in-person race through the boroughs this year.

That’s a *lot* of marathons, for a lot of runners, in a very short period of time, and these are just the World Marathon Majors we’re talking about. 

Smaller, more local races (including marathons) are surely plotting about their fall plans as well by now. Autumn feels like it’s so far away that who knows, maybe we (globally) could be in a profoundly different place by then, but at least for me, it’s hard to conceive of right now. At the same time, though, autumn isn’t really that far off.  

Even simply considering the likelihood that my more “local” marathons in 2021, like Mountains to Beach (late May) or CIM (early December) — both races that’d necessitate a good amount of driving and a hotel stay but that are completely accessible to the thousands of runners in and around the Bay Area, like me — could go on this year seems more like a weird, philosophic thought experiment than a statement predicting what may, in fact, actually happen. 

If you ask me when I’ll be ready to race again, the best I can give you is a shrug. 

It’s a weird spot to be in and definitely one where I’ve never been before, especially at this time of year, when I’m usually excitedly looking forward to a full, robust year ahead of training and racing and goal-chasing and poring over all the details to get me to where I want to go.

In the interim, I’ll just keep plugging along, mostly lollygagging with periodic bouts of it’s on-type of running, because for now, that’s good enough for me. 

Running isn’t cancelled, sure; I guess we’re just watching (experiencing?) a different channel right now.