14 Weeks: The Enduring Runner

I blame Gmail.

Logging onto the Bolder Boulder’s website late on Memorial Day to confirm the great race my 9 year old daughter and I ran together, I got side tracked. The myriad of links, banner ads, and queued up emails on the screen before me are a thousand different doors tempting you to open them with a click and be swept off on a new and intriguing topic. Soon you are link jumping all over the place, usually forgetting how you got there or what you were doing in the first place. Ok…I blame my inability to focus.

“I could do that,” I thought as the new Boulder Marathon website loaded up in my browser. The words “New Date” suckered me into clicking the link. Long a favorite local route, the original “Boulder Backroads” race was traditionally run at end of September, a time ripe with scheduling conflicts. As hundreds of tiny pixels conspired to reveal the new date – “Labor Day” – I knew I was had.

Twenty-three times I have circled the Bolder Boulder route on Memorial Day. My friends and family always know where to find me once a year.  We plan our lives around it.

“Labor Day,” I said to myself, “the other bookend to summer.  The other Monday holiday. Memorial Day’s Siamese-twin.”

Five minutes later I was registered. Another two minutes and I had counted the interval between the bookends of summer – 14 weeks.

Fourteen Weeks!

What was I thinking?

I’m not in shape for this. I spent all winter on skis and a snowboard.  I haven’t run a step since November and not many steps then. Other than a couple of six week crash training programs to get me through Hood-to-Coast the last two years, I haven’t done any training of consequence since the end of 2008 – two-and-a-half years!

What was I thinking?

Fourteen Weeks!

I blame myself. I am the problem. An addict.

No matter where I am. No matter what I am doing. No matter how long it has been. There is always something calling in the back of my mind.

It is the reason I pack running shoes on every business trip even if I haven’t used them in six months. Knowing that I could slip them on at any time and go is mentally as important as actually doing it.

I am an enduring runner.

It certainly isn’t the call of “Glory Days.” First of all, there wasn’t all that much Glory. When your College Football team plays in back-to-back national championship games, no other sports exist. And, that is no complaint. I hope the Golden Buffs and John Embree see that vaunted January game again soon.

Second, I have no romanticized notion of running or old dreams yearning to be fulfilled. I was eager to begin post-collegiate life with a new set of goals and priorities that didn’t include strings of 80+ mile weeks, meals of top ramen and lima beans, night cramps, 8 hour bus rides to places like Ames, Norman, Stillwater, Lincoln, Lawrence, and Manhattan (KS). The memories are still great, but they don’t define me, let alone call me back.

So what forces caused me in just 5 minutes to voluntarily submit my name for a 14 weeks fool’s errand?

The truth is it has been in the making the entire two-and-a-half years since I did any training of consequence. In the back of my mind I knew the whole time. I knew I was cheating myself.

Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance Man of “unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination" remarked how much creativity and inventiveness suffered as people no longer escaped without news for a month to be among their own thoughts. His time away from Florence and Rome often precipitated his best work.

William Power’s work Hamlet’s Blackberry deals with the conundrum of connectedness in a world far more distracted than that of da Vinci; a world that is my own.

When I book myself in “Outdoor Conference Room” for two hours, I am a better thinker. I return a better teammate. A better leader.

My best ideas are earned while sweating it out over a 15 to 20 mile loop. A period of time when the mind naturally allows only one thought in at a time – like a single file line prioritized by some unconscious cerebral process activated by the rhythm of a body gliding down a back road. The discipline and routine critical to endurance athletes are essential ingredients of any successful professional. Studies consistently show early risers that begin the day sweating are among the most successful at their craft.

In the five minutes it took to volunteer myself for 14 weeks of crash Marathon training, there was a simple acknowledgement that it was about the 14 week process to return a life to balance that had wobbled badly off axis.

Areté, perhaps the most articulated of aspirational Greek values, is the pursuit of harmony between mind, body, and soul that is required to achieve your highest human potential. It seems appropriate the pursuit of one distinctly Greek value should come through preparation for an event born of the same place. The herald Pheidippides collapsed and died of exhaustion from covering the 42km between Marathon and Athens. Time and again, my exhaustion and potential collapse are born of a life without balance. A life without the energy running feeds to my mind, body, and soul.

Two weeks from another duel with the Marathon, I fear I haven’t done enough training to survive the distance without the final 10K turning into a death march. That is not only likely, but inevitable – I will suffer mightily.

I am absolutely exhilarated however. The preparation for this test has returned me to a sustainable life-style where all phases of my life are indeed showing signs of life.

What was I thinking?

I needed to find myself once again on the dirt roads north of Boulder Reservoir.