For years every January was the same because every December I finally conceded to whatever injury had been nagging me since—well, since the spring. Because I wouldn’t take time off to heal, those little aches that started in May would explode into full-blown injuries by Christmas. I had to stop running until it didn’t hurt to walk. So every January I had to start over. And every January I swore that I would be wiser than I had been the year before.
I never was.
When you start running at age 43, as I did, it’s easy to forget that while the activity is brand-new, your body isn’t. It’s also easy to get caught up in how much fun you’re having and allow your enthusiasm to get the best of you.
I was one of those people who believed that everything that was written about running injuries applied to everyone except me. I believed that all of the advice about increasing mileage slowly and doing speed work only once a week was for those who were weak in body and spirit.
I believed that if running 3 miles a day 3 days a week was good for you, then surely running 6 miles a day 6 days a week would be infinitely better.
See, a funny thing happened when I started to run: I started to feel better. Just living my life became easier because I was more active. I also started to change what I ate, eventually quit smoking, and even considered whether having a beer or 12 every day was a good idea.
What didn’t change was that I was completely and totally disconnected from my body.
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise. In my pre-running life, I treated my body as if it were disposable. I had no connection to my body, so abusing it with cigarettes or food or alcohol didn’t mean anything to me. Even when my body objected, like the times when I had to be rushed to the hospital because it seemed as if I was having a heart attack, I found a way to disassociate my behavior from the outcome.
I didn’t become a new me when I started running. It turned out I was just as capable of doing damage to myself by overdoing something good as I had ever been at overdoing something bad.
Beyond the abject disrespect I had for my body, there was also the fact that I was totally ignorant of how my body functioned. I had never tried to live in my body. Hearing my heartbeat, listening to my own breathing, feeling the fatigue overcoming me were all new.
At first I thought it was a guy thing. I grew up in the John Wayne era of the man’s man. As kids we would play war, or cowboys and Indians, and get shot all the time. There was an art to being injured—you had to grab the site of the injury and fall to the ground, only to bounce back up. No injury was enough to keep you down.
I took that same John Wayne mentality into my new running life. Knee pain? Grab the knee and keep going. Hip pain? Keep going. My mind-set was that I could run through anything. I had true grit. There was no pain too great, no risk too great, to stop me from running.
That is, until I found myself sitting on an examination table having a conversation with an orthopedic surgeon. My complaint was that my knee was killing me, and since I was preparing to run a marathon soon, I needed to get the situation addressed immediately.
I had ignored the 10 percent rule for increasing your weekly mileage. I wanted to get to where I was running close to 40 miles a week, and I had ramped up my mileage very quickly in order to get there.
Let’s not forget that I was still running at barely a 10-minutes-per-mile pace, so 40 miles was close to eight hours of running per week.
The doc looked at my training log, which I had brought in to prove to him that I was capable of running the kind of mileage I was running and that the knee pain wasn’t related to my stupidity. He noted the dramatic increase in mileage, and I explained that it was necessary in order for me to prepare for the marathon.
Sensing, I suppose, that I was stubborn and beyond reasoning with, he agreed to give me a shot of cortisone in my knee.
Now I knew the secret. You could overtrain, do stupid things, and hurt yourself—and there was a way to fix it.
Over the next couple of years I found myself sitting on that examination table a number of times. It might have been my knee, it might have been my hip; it didn’t matter. I knew the doc had the secret formula to make me feel better, and I wanted it.
Eventually he looked at me and said, “You’re not 25 years old anymore. If you keep this up, you won’t be able to run at all.”
That was the last time I saw him. I figured if he didn’t know how different my body was from every other body, then I wasn’t going to continue to see him.
What I did next was become my own Dr. Frankenstein. I self-diagnosed and self-medicated in a futile attempt to erase the years of damage I had done to myself. I took massive dosages of anti-inflammatories, I wrapped and braced and strapped myself, all in order to keep running.
Before you assume that I am the only one who could possibly be this silly, just look around you at any race. You will see people with every kind of magic device, trying to avoid the truth about what they’re doing to their bodies. For them, as it was for me, it isn’t the running that creates the problems. It’s ego. It’s vanity. In my case, it was the irrational fear that if I quit running, even because I was injured, I’d never find the courage to start again.
So, as I said, every January it was the same thing. Every January I was starting over. Every January I worked out a training plan that called for me to be gentle on my body, that increased my mileage slowly, and that kept me healthy. And by every March I had given up on that plan.
A physical therapist explained to me once that she saw only two kinds of people in her practice: those who didn’t use their bodies enough and those who used their bodies too much. As runners, we almost always fall into the category of those who use our bodies too much.
It turns out that to run for life, you have to learn to maintain your most important piece of equipment: yourself. It was a very difficult lesson for me to learn. For most of my life I had taken the opposite approach: I believed that if I didn’t use my body, it would last forever. Considering that on the day of my very first run I owned nine motorcycles, two cars, a Volkswagen camper, a lawn tractor, and a gas-powered weed whacker, “exertion” was not in my vocabulary. Exertion was something I hired someone else to do. To exert myself was, well, unthinkable. I was an intellectual, after all. I did my work with my brain, not my body.
As a former motorcycle mechanic, though, I understood that for bikes to perform their best, they had to be maintained. I would spend hours and days adjusting and lubricating and polishing. I’d change the air filters on the vehicles so the engines would get clean air, all the while smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day, polluting my own lungs. I was a fanatic about the kinds of gas and oil that I used in the bikes, but I’d put any kind of junk inside myself.
But what I discovered, beginning with my very first run, was that unlike a piece of mechanical equipment, which wears out the more you use it, I actually got stronger the more I worked out. I was barely able to run (really it was more of a waddle) for a quarter of a mile that first day, but in just a few weeks I could cover an entire mile. It took me nearly 30 minutes, but I was able to do it.
I’ve learned that my body will do almost anything I ask of it as long as I give it time to adjust to new demands. I’ve been able to complete 45 marathons by gently coaxing my legs to go just a little farther every week. I’ve been able to run faster by pushing myself just a little harder every now and then.
The simple truth is that when it comes to our bodies, we really do have to use them or lose them. If we let them go to waste, we’ll wake up one day and realize that even if we want to run, we can’t. By not pushing ourselves we concede to an inevitable decline, a loss of mobility, a future in which we become prisoners in our own bodies.
I’ve learned that the way to make your body last is to use it. The way to make sure all the internal parts are working is by moving all the external parts. And most important, whether your goal is to run 1 mile, to complete your first 5K, or to qualify for the Boston Marathon, understand that your body is a marvelous machine and you are your own mechanic.
Over the years I’ve gotten better at recognizing the early signs of an overuse injury—the quiet ache, the nagging tightness that precedes a full-blown outbreak—but it’s been hard to accept that in order to be a runner, you have to not run sometimes. I’ve never really been able to shake loose my fear that if I quit running, even if it’s for all the right reasons, I’ll never be able to come back.
That fear is based on my belief that it’s easier to start from scratch than it is to start again. When I started from scratch, I had no idea what to expect. In my joyous naïveté I just did what I needed to do. But when you’re starting over, your body and your brain are at odds. That belief has been confirmed by thousands of e-mails from injured runners, former runners, and wannabe runners. When you start with nothing, you have nothing to lose.
When you’re coming back from an injury or an extended layoff, your mind remembers what it was like when you were in your prime. Your mind remembers what it felt like to be able to run for as long as you wanted, or as fast as you wanted.
Your mind remembers the moments of exhilaration—picking up the pace at the end of a race or hitting some new mileage number. Your mind remembers, but your body doesn’t.
Our bodies have very bad short-term memories. Anyone who has ever run a marathon one Sunday and then struggled to get through a 3-mile run the next weekend knows what I’m talking about. Our bodies forget everything they’ve learned almost immediately. At least it seems that way.
I think I kept running through the pain and the injuries because I was afraid that the will I had to begin the first time wouldn’t be there when I needed to begin again.
What I didn’t recognize was that, through running, I had undergone a fundamental change in who I was. My fear of not being able to come back didn’t take into account that, injured or not, I was a runner.
It’s difficult to accept, but the truth is that sometimes you are a better runner when you choose not to run for a while.
At this stage of my life it’s nearly impossible for me to imagine not being a runner. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t run or walk. I would stop being who I am if I had to give up the activity that makes me who I am.
I am learning to accept that taking time away from running in order to keep running is something I have to do. If I want to be able to run forever, I may not be able to run today.
I don’t want to have to face another January injured. I don’t want to be the guy who looks like he just escaped from a medical-supply store.
One of the greatest gifts I’ve received from running has also been one of the most difficult truths to accept: I’ve had to learn that I am human.
My body is not unique or special. I am certainly not gifted. My body functions in exactly the same way that every other body functions. If I am kind to my body, it works well. If I abuse my body, it will eventually shut down.
The extension of that truth is that the same rules that apply to my body apply to the rest of me. I am human not just in body but in mind and spirit.
I spent the early part of my life not just abusing my body with smoking and drinking and overeating but abusing my spirit as well. When my body became loaded down with weight, it buried my spirit.
Running has taught me, and continues to teach me, that there is joy in accepting the fact that I am fully human. I am susceptible to all the trials and tribulations that we all have to face. I cannot hide from them. I cannot escape from them. I have to meet them head-on. And maybe that is true true grit.
I have not faced my final injury. I have not confronted my last comeback. I know that another time will come when I will have to start over from scratch.
The difference is that these days I face that challenge with the knowledge that not only did I have the courage to start, but I have the courage to start again and again.