On Running
Your body evolved for moving, walking, running. Your brain evolved for pattern matching, prediction, measurement. Your soul resonates to rhythms, beats, melody.
I never used to run. I tried cross country when I was in primary school and hated it. There was something about the way the air burned in my throat and chest that I couldn’t get past. Maybe also running in a crowd. I used to swim though. A lot. My favourite training session was on Fridays, just doing length after length without stopping for an hour, a hundred lengths or more. I enjoyed long distance open water swimming events, 1200m or 1500m. I lived 600km from the closest coastline so this was typically done in very murky lakes with somewhat questionable water quality which really just motivated you to close your eyes and get through it with just a modicum of haste. In retrospect, I’ve always been drawn to endurance activities: swimming, hiking, if not actually running, and coding. I’m serious! Programming for 36 hours straight is an endurance activity, if perhaps somewhat less healthy than the others, and I spent much of my 20s doing it. You know, professionally.
I don’t know exactly why I started running. Well, I can’t remember but the RunKeeper account I created when I started still says my “motivation” was “losing weight”. That’s probably right. After moving to New Zealand I got chubby (as bro), as many people who come from my neck of the woods seem to. Good dairy, low stress, great cafe’s, excellent coffee, RedBull, nerd-life desk job. Muffins. So many muffins. Listen, I was entirely unprepared for life working in an office with a Hollywood Cafe downstairs with an extra large flat white and two 600-million-calorie muffin combo special, ok? Hm, delicious muffins.
Anyway, whatever the reason (no doubt it was the flabby pants overhang), I started a running program (that I highly recommend) called Couch-to-5km on the 10th of October 2010. I ran (narrator: it wasn’t running) 2.17km at a pace of 7:28 after which I was entirely convinced that I was going to die from an aneurysm. And perhaps not quick enough… I followed the program for another 10 straight days before giving up. Calendar days, that is. On the 10th of January 2011, 3 months later, I gave it another go. This time I kept on the program until the 18th of February when I ran my first ever 5km without stopping, at a pace of 6:59. Now that my body knew it could actually run 5km without a terminal cardiac event, I kept doing more or less that distance once a week (maybe once every two…ish weeks), not really working at getting better until March of 2013 when I suddenly, and somewhat inexplicably decided to run 10km without stopping. Well, I decided that I wanted to anyway. It seemed like a worthy aspirational goal, if completely impossible, going by the past 3 years of running experience. With a total running distance to date of 621.6km it was really nearly as hard as I imagined it would be, but 3 months later on the 24th of May 2013 I ran my first non-stop 10km in 1hour 12 minutes at a pace of 6:46 at the tender age of 34. And then again 2 days later at a pace of 6:33. Like a goddamn boss.
It’s a curious thing, what happens in your mind, when you’ve done something difficult. Once you know for sure you can do it.
My first 20km was on the 11th of October 2015, first (and also sub 2 hour) 21km on the 1st of November 2015, first 25km on the 23rd of April 2017, first 30km on 26 December 2019 and first (also sub 4 hour) 42km on the 25th of September 2021. Admittedly, not heroically fast progression, but here we are. And I know all of this because of my obsessive compulsivity around collecting metrics (is the unexamined life even worth living?!). I have every run I’ve ever done (barring the four times I was betrayed by my technology) recorded in either RunKeeper or Strava. I know, I know. I have a problem.
Some things I’ve learnt about running, which may seem obvious to most (I’m not always so quick on the uptake, needing, you know, personal experience): good and properly fitting running shoes and proper running clothes make a huge difference to your running experience. When I started running I thought the chafing would stop once I lost some weight. It’s been 12 years and 15kg and it has not stopped. Cotton t-shirts are terrible running gear and absolutely horrific for nipples. You don’t know pain until you get into a hot shower with bleeding nipples and thighs. It’s the bad pain.
Hydration is essential (to me at least). I never run more than 10km without water and I now drink so that I never actually get thirsty on a run. Makes the run nicer and recovery much faster. I use a running vest, hydration pack or a hydration belt and stick my phone and other goodies in there too. Auckland is warm and humid in summer (read: sweaty as bro) and I’ve been on runs where I’ve noticed half way through that I just stopped sweating. Suspect that’s probably not good, so I make sure to carry water. Nutrition is a good idea (GU energy gels are great) and electrolytes (PURE Electrolyte Hydration, Saltstick), especially if you’re a salty sweater (it’s a thing, I am that thing), is a great idea.
I think I really fell in love with running while living in Wellington from 2019 to 2021. It’s a great — possibly the greatest — city for running even though the wind on a lot of days is comically ridiculous. I have actually laughed out loud to myself at the absurdity of trying to “run” into a wind so strong it’s hard to breathe, let alone run. My back yard for most of my time in Wellington was the East Harbour Regional Park which had some truly epic running trails. Some of them, a friend, accurately described their somewhat technical nature as “Ninja Training”, but mostly just beautiful ridgeline forest running. Spending hours on those trails has been one of my favourite things to do in my life.
There is a spectrum of types of running. The simplest long flat road runs can be monotonous but your mind is free to wander; you can think and work through things. Technical trail running can be precarious, taking all of your concentration to avoid breaking your important bits and dying; it focuses your mind and creates a sense of flow, of complete immersion in the activity.
Running through a forest is, in my humble opinion, the second most primal thing a human can do, coming in just barely behind staring into a campfire on the open African savanna on a clear night. When you combine good rhythmic music with a forest run while you’re at a decent level of fitness, it can be a completely transcendent experience. There is an intense psychological resonance when your mind-body-soul is in harmony doing what the all encompassing you has evolved for: moving through a natural, deeply ancestral environment; feeling, hearing the rhythms and patterns of your stride, heart, breath, music; the absolute focus of your mind as your brain is fully occupied making predictions and measurements and your body is fully occupied by moving you through a complex world. Transformative, enlightening. Deeply, profoundly satisfying.
While hard trail running leaves little space for thinking, long road runs leave nothing but space for thinking, especially once your body is fit enough to run for hours on autopilot. I use this time for problem solving, working through issues, thinking about what to write about. Sometimes it’s active meditation. Today I thought about how power distribution systems interact and what the implications were of importing network topology data into the energy data platform we’re building. Your mind is like a box of chocolates?
An often recurring theme for me is free will. At some point, in nearly every run I’ve done since October 2010, I’ve thought about free will.
I am convinced that we do not, in fact, have free will, at least not the free will most people imagine we have — that free will is an illusion. How can you, when the “you”, the machinery that manifests the “will” is none of your doing and thoughts and desires come unwilled from nowhere?
I think about free will while running, because, I wonder: why am I running? Why am I out here running? Why did I choose to run? Why haven’t I stopped? Why do I keep running? How am I choosing to keep running? How is it that I can choose to run and other people can’t? Why am I choosing to do this now but I didn’t and/or couldn’t before? Am I actually freely choosing to run? Could I freely choose to stop? How different am I now to the person who didn’t run and what changed? How did I decide to start running in 2010 but not in the 30 years before that?
I saw a quote on Facebook the other day: “running is nothing more than a series of arguments between the part of your brain that wants to stop and the part that wants to keep going”.
Why is there a part that wants to keep going? Why does it seem to win now, at least more often, but didn’t before?
I’ve never regretted going for a run, ever. The first runs (narrator: they were not runs) were very hard. Running a marathon is very hard. Running three marathons on three consecutive weekends was very hard. I’ve been extremely tired and sometimes in considerable pain (chafed nipples man, it’s very bad) after a run, but I’ve never gone for a run and regretted going for that run. I mostly feel pretty amazing after a run. Something about endorphins probably.
More than 6000km and hundreds of runs later, utterly convinced at all times that I won’t regret going for a run, why then, is it so hard to get off my arse and go for a run some days?
No idea.
I’ve also taken up cycling recently… and I think about triathlons a lot now. It’s probably a mid-life crisis.
