Pour Me A Story, Vol. 12

[extremely Hagrid voice] "you're a runner, Harry"

hey there pals, welcome to another one of those mid-week bonus editions of the newsletter. I kinda implied last week that I wasn’t gonna write this one because it felt incredibly self-indulgent, but I a) had to get it the HELL out of my brain and b) a friend of mine from back home sent me a text saying he wanted to read it, and I simply must give the people what they want! or at least one person. the rest of you may be severely disappointed.

in a little “how the sausage gets made” aside, I was honestly a little torn about where to publish this. a significant chunk of my patient, tolerant subscribers follow me on twitter, so I felt like none of this would be terribly new information for you. on the other hand, there are more of you here than there are on my long-dormant, “experiences of a new immigrant” blog, which hasn’t been updated since December 2019 when I wrote a post about the impending birth of the baby. subsequently I felt it might be a little weird that the latest life update I posted would be about running (spoiler alert), so here we are.

Get A Move On

over the break we rented a minivan and drove the 2,400-mile round trip to Cincinnati to spend the holidays with Alex’s family. a couple days before Christmas, having already embraced the holiday tradition of “eating and drinking without any regard for personal comfort,” I decided I’d go for a run and try to at least mentally feel better about the two pounds of Alex’s mom’s Christmas cookies I’d consumed in the past 48 hours.

I set off with a vague target in mind, a church about a mile and a half away, thinking a three-mile round trip would be a good way to burn a half-hour’s worth of calories. but as is so often the case, I didn’t really consider the fact that I was in an unfamiliar city and I certainly didn’t know the terrain I was taking on, much less whether these streets had sidewalks.

nevertheless I set off, got lost a couple times, got back on the right track, took on a sharp corner without sidewalks which left me to choose between running in the oncoming traffic lane or tumbling down a steep driveway (I opted for the former) and then, before I knew it, I found the church. still feeling pretty good, and seeing that my time and pace were better than expected, I checked the map and worked out the route home.

when I finally got back, I discovered with a healthy dose of surprise that I’d run a personal best over 5K, and by a good 50 seconds. I knew the widely accepted science that if you train at altitude, where there’s less oxygen in the air, you perform athletic feats better at sea level, a more oxygen-rich elevation. some quick Googling tells me Denver, which sits a mile above sea level, is almost 4,700 feet higher than Cincinnati, which is quite the difference. turns out the science was right: even with minimal stretching, terrible nutrition and a workout on unfamiliar roads in shoes I had never run in before, I crushed my best 5K time by almost a minute.

but I guess the context missing here is, why do I have a “best 5K time” in the first place? well, against all odds (like, every single one of them), over the summer and amid a raging pandemic, I…became a runner?

I’ve spent the majority of my adult life avoiding cardio unless it was absolutely necessary, and using excuses like “I don’t have the right body type for running” or “the impact fucks with my knees and back.” I’ve managed to remain in passable shape by lifting and getting plenty of walking done in my daily life, but then March happened.

once work-from-home started and the outside world ground to a halt, so did my morning gym sessions and any further desire to get out of the house. this malaise continued well after the baby arrived in late April, and my Apple Watch assumed I was dead until some time in mid-June. after paternity leave ended and I “returned” to work, Alex started encouraging me to leave the apartment in the afternoons to take a walk and get some fresh air for a half-hour or so.

I begrudgingly did it, and once I started hitting my meager movement goals on the watch, the thrill of the positive feedback loop returned the dopamine to my system and I wanted to keep the daily effort going. before too long, the half-hour walks weren’t intense enough to hit my watch goals, so I started jogging parts of my afternoon routes, and then that gave way to running.

the same old hurdles cropped up though. my back hurt, my knees hurt, and I could barely make it a half-mile before slowing to a walk to catch my breath. in uncharacteristic fashion for myself and most other men, I made a physical therapy appointment to figure out how to work out the muscle issues that were plaguing me. the physical therapist gave me one piece of advice, which I promptly scoffed at: take smaller steps, almost shuffle like an old man. “you’ll feel like an idiot, but come back in two weeks and let me know how it works for you.”

that was August 25. the very next evening I cracked the 30-minute 5K barrier, not stopping once for a walk break. better yet, my body held up to a blistering 9:40/mile pace. someone notify the International Olympic Committee. the physical therapist was right: small steps led to keeping my joints aligned under my body, which led me to be able to do what kids can do from like two years old: run.

since then, I haven’t really looked back. it took a few more weeks to get into the mindset that this was more than just “the only way I can get any exercise,” and one unseasonably cold September night after I returned from a sub-30 5K run as snow fell on Denver, Alex said to me, “you’re a runner now.” I scoffed again, not believing that a Monday night jog was a qualifying event to be able to call myself that, but it turned out she was right. and as the weather cooled off from the heat of summer into a mild fall, I was surprised to find that hey, this is actually getting easier? nobody ever accused me of being particularly clever.

later in September I took a leap of faith and signed up for an organized 5K race, the idea of which scared the shit out of me even though I’d been running that distance for weeks. when race day came, the nerves turned to adrenaline, and I managed to reel off another personal best, a time that now unbelievably feels slow.

after that race was over, I wasn’t sure what was next, so I dived into a guided 10K training program and gave my “fuck it, I’ll go for a run” workouts some actual structure. speed work, alternating distances and learning to pace myself — as well as dealing with running in the first snowfalls of winter — felt like a grind at times, but it all came together with a PR over the 10K distance the week before Christmas. it was only then that I felt comfortable calling myself a runner.

even so, I’ve barely recognized myself in this sense since that day in August when I figured out strides and pacing. I found myself looking forward to going for a run, and planning out routes and daily mileage, and reading Runner’s World articles and actually understanding what they were talking about. I bought sneakers for function rather than form for the first time in like two years, which may be the biggest change.

in Cincinnati it was kinda like “okay, so…what now?” Alex had asked me a couple weeks earlier whether I wanted to get faster or do longer distances, and I wasn’t really sure, but the challenge of a longer run really started to speak to me more than faster runs (as did “can my body even hold up to going faster?”).

so I did what Alex and my physical therapist had both told me to do multiple times over the past few months: I bit the bullet and registered for a half-marathon in 10 weeks’ time, That Dam Run at the Cherry Creek Reservoir on March 7.

A 13.1-mile run is 2.85 miles longer than I’ve ever run at one time before, and I don’t know how my body is gonna hold up to it. but at the very least, mentally I know I can make it across the finish line, and that’s half the battle.