Why I Run - Rambling Thoughts

I've been in somewhat of a inward-philosophical frame of mind through the last week, and decided I'd put together some of the thoughts running around my head at the moment. It's long and rambly.

Something I have been thinking about over the last two months, particularly during the darker days of August as I struggled with the flu, is why I run.

I have a standard prepared response for this question when it is raised by others from time to time: it is a time efficient activity, and appeals to the time-obsessive aspect of my personality. It combines exercise, accommodates my need for competition, provides numbers for later analysis and comparison, and has provided an excellent social base for both myself and EliseS, something I have battled a bit since we moved up from Melbourne in 1998.

Thinking on it more deeply raises further issues. Looking on the circumstances in which I took up running again gives a fairly standard response. In late 1999, I realised that as I approached 30 my physical condition was getting out of control. I was eating badly, drinking too much, stressed from work and the only exercise I was getting was a round of golf once a week. With my father in the grave before he turned 60, and my mother started to show the signs of what early in 2000 turned out to lung cancer, health issues came to the forefront and I realised that I had to make lifestyle choices that would affect the rest of my life. I bit the bullet, took a job a lot closer to home, joined a gym, and started to shed weight and improve fitness. I hit a plateau in late 2001, and with the spark of a friend’s wife doing the City 2 Surf, I decided to take up running. After much research and buying some kit, I hit the roads in January 2002, with the intent of doing the City 2 Surf. Running provided a mental solace during the month we were in Melbourne dealing with the final stages of my mother’s terminal lung cancer, and the miles came up quickly. I found myself at the start of the 2002 SMH Half Marathon which I completed in around 1 hour 55 minutes, and the rest is, as they say, history.

I could have stayed a weekend warrior, a hack, and for a year, I guess I was. The obsessive, competitive streak in me would not be denied, and soon enough I was a Sydney Strider and pushing harder to run faster.

Fine – but why running?

I have a suspicion that I may have chosen running to prove something to myself. Through years of playing cricket and baseball up until my mid-twenties, I’d always looked at running as a fairly difficult and pointless task – one ran to retrieve a ball, to score a run, to get to the wicket to accept a throw from a fieldsman (I kept wickets), never just to get somewhere. Track seemed even more pointless, running around in circles (and yes, I am aware of the irony of being a motorsport fan where that is basically the same thing). Not to mention runners being injury prone – most people I knew who ran invariably carried some sort of niggle. It seemed all too hard for too little reward.

As my fitness improved through 2001, I was looking to the next level. Running was a natural step from the long hard bike rides I was doing around Sydney (and a lot less likely to get me killed!). The physical side made sense. Mentally, it was a bit of a leap, and it represents an ongoing battle.

Getting deeper into it, half of the appeal now is overcoming the mental barriers – the wanting to stop through a long run because it’s hard and painful, the pushing hard in speed sessions even though I know the lungs will burn and the legs will scream. I think it is this that has sucked me into the vortex. I’ve traditionally battled with the mental side of physical activities – cricket, baseball and golf – and found the hardest opponent to overcome was myself. Running is no different – the internal voices that tell you that you’re too old and fat for this nonsense, that you’ve done enough for today, that your times are respectable and you can sit comfortably on them, that you’re doing more than 95% of the population. For mine, running is not so much about necessarily defeating those voices, but not being afraid of the confrontation, and understanding that sometimes the voices will win, and it’s not the end of the world when they do, because there will be other days when you will win, and provide an exhilaration and a feeling of personal, internal triumph for which there is probably no equal. I think that now is the driver – to no longer fear the confrontation with the personal demons of self-doubt and fear of failure.

I’m reminded of the great JFK quote about the moon project: “we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.

For mine – I may not necessarily enjoy the actual running, and it would be fair to say that generally I find it painful and inconvenient, but I do love the fact that I run. And that is enough.