I took a twelve-mile run on a recent Saturday as I am training for a half marathon. When I was done, I jogged over to my running group’s coffee gathering and sat down. I opened my Fitbit to confirm that I had run twelve miles, and I was surprised at what I saw. The monitor showed that between my morning dog walk and my run, I had exactly 25,000 steps.
I successfully completed high school math, which by today’s standards means I have the math prowess of a ten-year-old – okay, maybe an eight-year-old. So, I know that the probability of reaching exactly 25,000 steps is the same as reaching 24,984 or 25,013. But still, it gave me pause. Perhaps it was a sign. What was the universe trying to tell me?
I converted 25,000 minutes into seconds, hours, and days and added them and then subtracted from the present. Nothing clicked. Those figures did not align with being born, getting married, having children, educational or professional milestones, or future retirement. The possibility that I am going to die in 25,000 minutes or 25,000 hours was not one that I wanted to explore.
I tried to think of some significance of the number 25,000, or 2500, or 250. Maybe I will win the lottery with a payout of one of those sums. But knowing my luck, I will probably find a quarter on the pavement, instead. So much for the portend of financial fortuity.
My step count was drawing my attention to my run for reasons other than whether it felt hard or easy. It made me think about the progress of the run and the experience of it. These days, I eschew training schedules. When I became a devout runner more than thirty years ago, I would print out training schedules in hard copy and follow them to the letter. I logged my miles and jotted down whether they felt easy or hard.
I no longer do that because unlike an elite athlete, I never saw a correlation between religious adherence to a plan and how well I ran. World class athletes would tell you otherwise; outcomes are incremental but measurable. But for me, how hard I train does not seem to equate to how well I run a race. But then again, if I do not train at all, it will be awful. If I train, it might be awful, but it might not be. I guess it is like playing the lottery: you have to play to win.
As I have aged, the formula has become simplified. I do nothing special for a race shorter than a half marathon because my basic conditioning will suffice. For a half marathon, I start thinking about my mileage about four months beforehand. During non-training periods, my longest runs during the week are about six miles. When I am training, I add a mile to that distance every week and do shorter runs on other days. I continue to add a mile every week until my long run feels like a grind. At that point, I reduce my longest run by a couple of miles the following week. Then the next week, I ramp it up again.
Two or three months before the race, I run quarter mile “quarters” at the track every week or so. I alternate running hard and slow quarters, starting with four hard quarters. Each week, I add another hard quarter. It is not pleasant, but it seems to improve my race finish times, or at least I recover more quickly.
Other than that, all I do is focus on how I feel during my runs. For me, running long distances is not about how hard I am breathing because although my breaths deepen and quicken a bit, I never really huff and puff like a sprinter. What happens instead is that overall body fatigue creeps up, and my muscles start to ache. The limitations imposed on my middle-aged body are a result of muscle fatigue, not being out of breath.
When I am exhausted, I run with my head down. Gazing at the horizon in the distance and observing its achingly slow arrival is agonizing. Instead, I watch objects on the ground approach and disappear – leaves, chalk marks on the roadway, crushed pinecones, pieces of paper, pebbles, puddles of water. The beauty of this process is that the more fatigued I am, the more I focus on objects closer and closer together. That way, even when I slow down, the visual interest stays the same, as objects pass at approximately the same rate of speed as if I am moving more quickly.
An added benefit of keeping my head down is that when I finally look up, I am always heartened by how much closer I am to the end point. Well, that, and if there is a quarter somewhere on my route, I am likely to see it.