Me Vs. Running

Back to our regularly scheduled programming...

I think a lot about running. Mostly about how not good at it I am. (which I recognize does nothing to help the situation, but it hasn't done anything to stop me) I spent the morning the other day on my bike thinking about running instead of thinking about biking - mostly dreading that I'd have to run when I was done.

Running and I go way back. Possibly even further back than me and walking, according to reports from my mother. Apparently, before I could walk I'd 'run' laps between the living room and the kitchen, supporting myself with one of those plastic shopping carts that I pushed in front of me. I spent plenty of time playing outside as a kid, running when it was required of me just like most kids.

I think I always knew I wasn't fast. Me and fast don't get along well either. But I could keep going forever. I think part of my problem was that I was growing so fast that I just plain couldn't control my scrawny, overgrown limbs. Seriously, if you look at those children's height/weight charts, while my weight was normal, my height was off the charts. If there was such a thing as being in the 120th percentile, that's where I was. It's probably a miracle I'm six feet tall instead of seven.

In spite of my lack of speed, I still thoroughly enjoyed doing anything and everything active and outdoorsy. I think I took gymnastics for about two hours (I still can't even do a cartwheel) and then moved on to your typical little kid schedule of soccer and tee-ball. But also spent plenty of time riding my bike all over town from the time I was four. Seriously, my best friend when I was little lived a little over a mile from me and the two of us would often ride between our houses. I actually remember when I was seven years old and we were riding to his house and I took a nasty spill about halfway there with no helmet and no moms in sight. My niece is that age now and I can't even imagine sending her on that same ride. She'd be crushed!

Anyway, I don't know that it ever really bothered me that much that I was slow - at least not at first. In spite of the slowness I at least had some coordination so I was decent at any of the sports I attempted to play. I got even slower when my accelerated growth started making my knees ache on a fairly constant basis. Fortunately, that went away eventually.

I accepted my slowness as part of the deal. Some people were born small and quick, and I was born to be big and awkward. I did take pride in the fact that I could keep going. In gym class in junior high it never bothered me when they'd make us run a few slow laps around the gym to 'warm up' (why, as 12-year olds, we needed to warm up to run around in circles and play 'bombardment' for 30 minutes I have no idea, but anyway...) I felt like I could run slow laps forever. Remember when we had to run the mile as part of the fitness test? Although it seemed like a daunting distance at the time, especially since it was something like 20 laps around the basketball court if I remember correctly, I don't think I ever felt hugely exhausted at the end. Sure, I wasn't fast, but if I had to keep going I could have.

While the sports I played did require running in short bursts at high speeds, which I already figured out wasn't my strong suit, I don't think I ever thought too much about being the slow kid on the team and I don't think any of my early coaches ever made a big deal of that fact. Although I do remember trying to stop 6-12 inches short of the line when running suicides in basketball practice in junior high. Why I thought that would save me a lot of time, I have no idea. But I do know that the coaches almost always noticed.

By the time I reached junior high my super-quick growth had slowed and I stopped being such a lanky kid as my love of Doritos and Pepsi finally started to catch up with me. That did nothing to help my speed. But again, this was just something I accepted, because surely just embracing the fact that I was a chubby adolescent was a lot easier than not eating Doritos, Pepsi and chocolate chip cookies. It's a wonder I was never sick. I don't think I ate any fruits or vegetables until I was about 21 years old.

My coaches never seemed to get upset that I wasn't fast, because they accepted it as reality too. As long as I looked like I was trying, even if I was the last one to make it back to the line. When I played softball the coach timed us to run all the way around the bases, but I wasn't chastised for having the worst time out of everyone.

High school turned out to be a different story. I had heard stories about the varsity basketball coach long before I got to meet the man for myself. Fortunately, by the time I got to him, he had already gotten in trouble the year before for hurling a chair against the bleachers in fury during a game. So I could be assured that he was probably going to take a break from tossing inanimate objects in fits of anger. He prided himself on having a 'fast' team. He loved to full court press and I had heard about how much he made people run in practice to make sure that his team was in better shape than anyone else's and would simply exhaust them until we beat them.

I didn't expect to make varsity as a freshman, but I did. In true teenage-Molly fashion, it was celebrated with a super-sized #4 extra value meal from McDonalds. (item #257 on the "no wonder I was fat" list) In tryouts the guy didn't seem so scary. Then I showed up to my first real practice on the morning after Thanksgiving. There were trash barrels on the four corners of the court. "In case you have to puke," coach proudly proclaimed.

He started us off with ten laps around the gym, but with a twist. Behind the bleachers on one long section of the court were stairs that led up to the locker rooms, then came down the other side. So for every lap we did it included running up those stairs, across and down the other side. I was never one to prepare for a season by getting in shape before, so by the end of just the warm-up I had been lapped by the entire team and tasted blood in the back of my throat. I did manage to keep my turkey dinner in my stomach for the entire practice, but I am also pretty sure that I nearly cried on several occasions that day. I'm not positive, but I don't think we ever even touched a basketball that practice. I'm also pretty sure that in one week of high school basketball, I lost ten pounds.

Things got slightly better, and I don't think I tasted blood in the back of my throat all that much for any more of the practices, but I didn't get a whole lot faster. That drove my coach insane. For a guy who prided himself on having a fast team, I was definitely not what he was looking for. He loved to scream at me about it. He loved to scream at me about almost anything, really. I was a 14-year old kid and I vividly remember when we played this team who had the league MVP on it. She was 6'2", 18 years old and already had secured a full scholarship to UCONN, the ultimate college for women's basketball. As the tallest (also youngest) person on the team, not a starter but typically the 6th man, apparently I was supposed to do something about her. By halftime she was having a career game and I was getting screamed at to get my "fat ass of the floor!" (aka, "Jump!") For future reference, that is not the best way to motivate me.

Coach loved to threaten us with more running. If we had a bad game, if we were talking in practice, if he dind't feel we worked hard enough, he'd make us run more. "Bring your track shoes!" He'd love to yell if we had a particularly poor outing in some game or another. He'd sometimes make me run more by myself if I couldn't make some arbitrary time standard he invented on the spot for some sprints.

I was on a team full of speedy guards, there was just no way I could compare. In all fairness, he did yell at each of us, and all of us collectively, but I seemed to be his favorite target. He was never quite as mean to me after my freshman year, and I don't think I'll ever understand why. By my senior year he was forced to mellow out quite a bit because during one early-season game he had yelled at us so much that he had to get hernia surgery, so he was literally medically limited from yelling too much. I also managed to get a pretty nasty sprained ankle that season and got myself a ticket to no more running stairs.

So I spent four years being constantly reminded of how fat and slow I was. (coach made fairly frequent references to my being 200 pounds - a fact he couldn't have known for sure because it's not like we weighed in or anything, but if you saw me back then, it was probably a pretty safe guess - and just the kind of thing you want broadcast when you are a teenager) In fact, in spite of playing JV softball as a freshman, I wound up being cut completely when I was a sophomore. The reason I was given? Too slow to run the bases. I was too slow to run sixty feet at a time. Let me tell you, as a 200-pound kid, one thing I did not have a problem with was hitting the ball far. Far enough that it probably didn't make the slightest bit of difference how slow I was running. But no, in a sport where being quick on your feet is one of the last things you have to worry about, as plenty of grown men play the sport while drinking beer between innings, I was just way too slow to be bothered with. (I made every all-star team there was before then, so it's not like I wasn't any good)

My running "skills" were so legendary, that it garnered an article in the newspaper. One of my favorite teachers in high school taught my honors writing class my senior year. It was the only honors class I took in high school, and it was a last-minute scramble to get me into his class. I recall submitting my application to the head of the English department when I ran into him in the hallway. He was the soccer coach and he had his pen held to the paper to sign off on it the minute I gave it to him before he paused and said, "Let's just make sure you're literate," before turning the page over and giving my essay a glance and then turning the paper back over and approving my application.

Mr. Sullivan's class was one of, if not the favorite class I had in high school. "Coach" as he liked to be called (although he didn't actually coach anything while I was there - and his demeanor was definitely far different from my other coach) also wrote a sports column in the newspaper. In 2005 I qualified for Kona for the first time, and Coach was going to write a column on me and my triathlon accomplishments to date. At that point I had completed only two Ironmans. We had a nice phone conversation and then a few days later the article came out.

Essentially, it was 1000 words making fun of the way I used to run up and down the basketball court. I might have actually been offended if I wasn't already well aware of how true it all was. At the time of the article I hadn't played a game of basketball on the West High School court in eight-and-a-half years. I must've left quite an impression with the way I ran if he still remembered the way I "lumbered" (that was the word he used) up and down the court. Again, I might have been upset if I didn't realize that that was the perfect word to describe it.

I think one season I actually attempted to get in shape before that dreaded day after Thanksgiving practice. Remember the infamous "Jimmy shoes" from that episode of Seinfeld? I had a pair of those and I tried to "train" with them. I think I made it a week before my calculus teacher wondered why I was limping (my calves were killing me!) and I decided it was stupid and not worth it, so that was the end of the experiment with the Jimmy shoes and any dashing hopes I had of learning to dunk before high school graduation.

I didn't pursue any basketball scholarships or try to get recruited. I decided in one visit to Boston when I was a junior that I wanted to go to Emerson, and I didn't care about anything else. Division III basketball isn't nearly as demanding as I or II, and that was why I liked it. I did wind up getting set up on a training program to get ready for the season. I distinctly remember being asked by the trainer doing my fitness assessment to run a mile and a half on the treadmill and I laughed at him, thinking he couldn't possibly be serious that he wanted me to run that far. He didn't laugh back, so I started to run. I really wish I knew now what my time was, but I'd be surprised if it was anything less than 15 minutes - maybe 20.

My college coach was nothing like my high school coach. This may or may not have been out of necessity. You see, it was fairly often that we'd be an hour away from leaving for a game and calling random people we knew to see if they could come be on the team for the night so we wouldn't have to forfeit. Coaches can't be jerks when one, they don't have much of a team to begin with. And two, if you yell and scream too much you might lose what few players you do have and wind up having to forfeit the season. I don't think he was that kind of coach anyway, though. Either way, it gave me a "nothing to lose" mentality and instead of being annoyed that we were a terrible team made up of literally three people who were dedicated enough to go to every game (the other two were whoever we could find - including eventually one player who I later found out wasn't even technically eligible because she was a Harvard student who only took one class at our sister school. But hey, trust me, nobody was protesting any games.)

I was almost sure that we would lose every game we played, so why not just go out and have fun? I got to do a lot of things I'd never gotten to do on any other teams I played for. I brought the ball down the court like a point guard on occasion, took and even made a few three-pointers (if my high school coach had ever caught me outside the three-point line instead of within three feet of the basket, let alone taking a shot, he might have taken up chair-hurling again) I averaged 21 points a game my freshman year. As a team, we averaged 25. We did come away with three wins somehow, one that was a forfeit to us. We forfeited twice that season, I think both times because I sprained my ankle badly enough that I couldn't play for a few days. I managed that twice that season, and in both cases my team was forced to finish the game with four players. One of those times, the other coach was nice enough to encourage her players to run the score up over 100. Pretty sure that was the only time in my career that my coach asked us not to shake their hands afterward.

Ok, so what the heck does all of that have to do with running? I still wasn't fast, but by necessity, I had to play every minute of every game. I think it was the end of the season before I realized that I didn't even notice anymore. Future seasons gave us a few more players and even some actual wins, but I still tended to stay on the court the whole game, and it never tired me out too much.

I was never, ever yelled at for being slow on the basketball court in college. I never thought about running much, either, it was just part of the game. It wasn't until I returned from a semester in Los Angeles of classes and interning and zero exercise except for my weekend visit to Huntington Beach for a bit of surfing that I decided I needed to supplement my practices by running a bit on my own. I had never considered running on purpose, and just because I said so, until then. When I moved back into my dorm at 80 Boylston, one of the first things I did was walk down the street to City Sports and pick up a pair of Nike running shoes. I picked them solely because they fit and I thought they looked pretty good.

I started with a mile on the treadmill, and I probably felt like I was going to die at the end. I also probably tried running it way too fast and kept changing the speed of the treadmill, but I made it. And I decided to run a mile every day. Then one day I upped it to two. Then by the time graduation rolled around I was running four miles almost every single day. A couple of years earlier my sister had run the Boston Marathon for charity. That is definitely not the reason that I started getting into endurance sports. My sister is seven years older than I am and we were always interested in different things growing up, so I definitely wasn't jumping into marathon running just because she did. But I do remember going to watch her, and my brother-in-law jumped in to run the final four miles with her. My mother suggested that maybe if she ran it next year I could be the one to help her in those final miles. "Are you crazy? I can't run four miles!"

Turns out, I could. And I actually got to the point where I kind of liked it. I'm not sure I actually liked running in and of itself, but rather I liked the idea of being able to run four miles, because my own head always told me that there was no way I'd ever be able to. In spite of my internal protests in the past, it turned out that it actually did get easier the more I did it. And I hated the idea of stopping and then having to build up to it again. So in spite of having no more basketball seasons to get in shape for, once I graduated I decided I was going to keep on running.

So I kept at it. After a summer of running just to run and a winter of ski instructing I did my first run races and triathlons. I took a break from being focused on training while I pursued my short-lived film career, but I still made time to run before or after being on set all day and bike up and down the PCH in Malibu on the weekends. Once I moved back east I started to get more serious about my training. I bought some books and signed up for my first Ironman.

I should mention that I never had any huge, lofty goals when it came to doing triathlons. I had no friends in the sport and I would show up to races without knowing a soul aside from my parents who were nice enough to come and cheer me on. Except my first race, where my very pregnant sister was my lone spectator. So I had no idea what I was doing. It was just something to fill the void now that I wasn't playing basketball and after losing 70 pounds after college, I really didn't like the idea of putting them back on.

I felt like I got faster almost by accident. I just went out and swam, biked and ran based on the training plans I made up. Those first few years I don't think I ever did a single interval workout aside from the swim workouts I did from a book I bought. I'd just go out and run for a certain amount of time and bike for a certain amount of time or in the case of the long ride a certain amount of miles.

Given my history with running, it was probably a bigger surprise to me than to anyone that I was somehow suddenly halfway decent at it. I was consistently mediocre at swimming (once I graduated from being totally, completely awful at it) and biking came easier than I'd like to admit. But comparatively speaking, my run splits weren't doing too badly against everyone else, either. It was like I had conquered this thing that had been pushing me down my whole life. I had no concept of pacing in races, but managed to do fairly well in a lot of those, too. I felt like I had finally figured out the mystery to the whole running thing that I never thought I'd solve.

Suddenly I had expectations that were never there before. And suddenly I found myself unable to meet them. You should know that nobody set them but me. While my current program is very specific and goal-based, what I did back then I just made up. It started to get a lot harder to better previous performances because I was going faster than I'd ever dreamed possible. And in the beginning, the sole goal was simply to do better than I did last time. So what happened when it suddenly got a lot harder to do better than last time? I got disappointed. It wasn't by much, at first. And ironically, it was based on times that had I achieved maybe a mere six months earlier I would've been ecstatic. But like I said, the bar had been raised and suddenly I wasn't able to meet it.

Then, to make matters worse, I had to go and get injured. I had spent 6 years training for triathlons with my worst issue being a strained hamstring I got doing the Reach the Beach Relay - meaning that the injury had a definite cause, an identifiable name and was easily treatable with my first month-long break from running since I started running in the first place. Fortunately, this also occurred at the end of the season, so I can't say that the break was unwelcome.

But this was different. I was out on a run one early morning in March, and, as all running injuries occur, I was as far from home as I could possibly be on that routine 7-miler I'd done a hundred times when there was suddenly this pain in my lower back. I was 28, not 68, and I didn't feel like I was old enough to have back pain.

Plus, as I later learned during my attempts at self-diagnosis on the internet, back pain is often mysterious. Also, it can take an awfully long time to go away. So long, that in some cases it just plain never goes away. So let's just say that after a few weeks of definitely not running, and barely even being able to bike and swim without pain and not the slightest idea what was wrong with me, I was in fear that I had run my last race.

I had the California 70.3 coming up less than two weeks after the injury, a plane ticket, a place to stay and most likely an inability to race. It was the first race I'd ever signed up for and not done, and it was terrible. Oh, sure, on race morning it was kind of nice not to have to get up at 3:30 in the morning and stuff down some horrible breakfast, then hope that I'd be able to clean out my system entirely before putting on my wetsuit and diving into the frigid Pacific. But really, truly, I would've much rather been racing.

I did finally manage to find a doctor who could tell me what was wrong with me - after waiting over two weeks to get an appointment since he was so in-demand. I had done something to my sacroilliac joint. Until then I didn't even know I had one of those. It was nothing I'd ever heard of anyone having, and it made me nervous that it would never go away, even though he told me it would. I hadn't run in five weeks when he finally told me I could give it a shot, and it was another two weeks of running through pain before I was finally back on track.

Unfortunately, the damage had been done. I had spent too much time wallowing and feeling sorry for myself and putting on weight that I faced quite a mountain to climb before I might be able to race again. The problem was, it was May, and the racing season was upon us.

Although I physically recovered from that, running has never been the same for me. I spent the rest of the season setting new personal worsts and just waiting for some other pain to flare up and keep me from doing what I love to do. I missed out on qualifying for Kona after going for three years in a row - twice by winning my age group by nearly an hour. This time I wasn't even close. All of that confidence I'd found was obliterated by a few disappointments and one especially painful winter run.

I got within spitting distance of getting it back last season, but while it was a vast improvement over the year before and I was initially pleased with the results, it just wasn't quite good enough. I got impatient again, and once again I was left wondering if it ever actually would get easier again. This led to another useless spiral down and too much thinking about how fast I used to be.

I'm being told that's the problem, that I need to stop thinking about before and start thinking about after. It's not easy. It's hard to be happy that I did better in a race last week than maybe I did in February when a couple of years ago I was way, way faster. Somehow I've got to find a way to get that confidence back that I just need to keep at it and it will come back. I'm in a wonderfully injury-free zone at the moment so the only thing stopping me is above my shoulders. I just need to decide to take the next step.