Runners are different

If hockey were the arranged marriage of my teens then the marathon was that first dangerous infatuation of my late twenties. Like all young love, running would come to define me.

I had been born again at the age of twenty-seven but my church wasn’t a building and my prayers weren’t humble entreaties for moral strength but desperate supplications for the only thing that mattered – speed on race day.

Old River Road in Lakefield, Ont., was my cathedral. My devotion measured in mileage and while my God may not have been quite as unforgiving as the one found in the Old Testament, suffering was certainly a sign that the running God’s favour had been bestowed upon the faithful, manifesting itself in stress fractures, tendonitis and bleeding nipples.

Run far enough and inevitably it becomes a spiritual endeavor.

In high school I had been a middle-of-the-pack cross-country runner. Like a lot of kids, I ran because, bereft of any soccer ability and my school’s mandate that I occupy my time in worthy athletic pursuit, running was something that anyone could do.

Best of all the cross-country team never cut anyone.

My father had been a 2:48 marathon runner in the 1970s, regularly running upwards of one hundred miles a week. I used to run the first few training miles with him when I was six and, later on, the last few in the marathon. But like teaching, I never thought it was something that I would become involved in. Distance running was for crazy people like my dad, a man who ran 15 miles in the morning and sometimes-another ten at night. My Dad was an athlete who once ran two marathons in a week, the second one hung over. He had been known to fall asleep at dinner parties during the higher mileage weeks.

And there were no low mileage weeks.

I can’t provide any profound insight on the deeper aspects of the marathon that litter the popular imagination. My life never changed much between races. I didn’t strive with what Shakespeare called, “things impossible.” Racing tended to remind me of my physical limits and how months of arduous training weren’t a guarantee that I would improve. I never saw God at the 30K marker and most of the time on course I spent checking my watch at mile markers, trying to see if they matched the splits I had written with a Sharpie on my arm.

Most of the time I was afraid of letting myself down.

I have spent the vast majority of my adult life grappling with what writer Kirk Johnson called the mystery of endurance. I am no closer to understanding it than the first time I ran a 5K fun run without stopping in Grade 2.

What I do know is that I loved distance running in a way that I am not sure I will ever quite understand, much less be able to explain to others. I loved unhinged muddy repeats on a waterlogged cinder track. I loved how cold beer tasted at the end of a hard week of high mileage. I loved feeling fit and the sense that, sadly, I was aging in the opposite direction of nearly everyone else I know. I loved how training defined me, but above all I loved being a student of the sport, and how a nod or an encouraging comment from my coach Paul Poce at the Toronto Olympic Club made me feel that I could leap small buildings in a single bound.

At 42 years old, with two-year-old twins, a stepson, a wife and a dog, I am a cliché now. I am lucky if I can get 50K in a week now. But it’s a sport that’s hard to let go and as my doctor once said, while shaking his head, “Runners are different. You can’t just tell them to quit or to stop.”