I’ve been meaning for a while now to get back into better running shape.
A few years ago, I was obsessively running fifty to eighty miles a week on the knee-friendly dirt trails of Nags Head Woods in OBX, but somehow that number has dropped off significantly.
Well, almost entirely.
This past winter and spring, I was mostly walking many of my miles on Lowcountry concrete, which is far less appealing to my aging body. There were weeks when I ran less than ten miles—and a few when I clocked zero.
For me, running takes a lot of mental bandwidth. When I was running big-mile weeks, I did very little writing, or anything else for that matter, except stretching and hydrating. When I am working intensely on a creative project, I tend to run a lot less. It’s not a question of having the time. It’s about how much is in the mental stamina tank. Walking is usually the most I feel I can do after an vigorous day of writing, especially if it is hot outside. The mental endurance required to run many miles often seems to be in direct competition with what’s needed to write for many hours. One only has so much fuel. Or so the you-don’t-have-to-run-when-you-are-writing story goes in my head.
My hero, Haruki Murakami, claims to have been able to write and run regularly for many decades. And he’s prolific. So I know my story is suspect. But it often feels very real to me. Or we might say the story serves a purpose.
I weigh myself every single day. It’s the first thing I do in the morning. And when I don’t run regularly, my weight creeps up a few pounds, even though I eat the same healthy diet. It’s not the number that bothers me so much as the feeling of being heavy and sluggish. And I know exactly at which number that discomfort begins. I can feel the added weight before I even step onto the scale and am seldom wrong. Staying south of my number is an important part of my mental health hygiene. Unfortunately, I’ve been flirting with my healthy weight ceiling for a few months now.
Yesterday, I decided to begin running more regularly with the aim of steadily increasing the weekly miles, so that I can get at least five pounds below that bloated feeling. I put on my New Balance runnings shoes, popped AirPods into my ears, and started jogging on concrete. I felt pretty good as I left my neighborhood and turned right onto Sams Point Road, but I started feeling sluggish as I ran along the highway, not even a mile into my run.
Oh, how I have fallen, I thought. Is it age? Apathy? Beaufort city life? Highway car fumes?
“Push on,” I told myself, as Public Enemy’s Fight The Power began playing in my ears. Chuck D and Flavor Flav shouted out, “Nineteen-eighty-nine!” and I felt ancient.
But I kept running.
When I turned right, into another neighborhood, I saw a young man in a car idling at a stop sign. He was looking directly at me and yelling, waving his hands to get my attention.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to There Will Be Mistakes to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.