Running is hard.
It involves a lot of time and effort. It involves just about every organ and part of your body — your legs, your abs, your arms, your lungs, your head, and most importantly, your heart. It requires a great deal of effort, and even long-time and accomplished runners show the strain on their faces and their bodies while sprinting toward the finish line.
It does get easier sometimes, but it never gets easy.
At least, that was my proposition in writing this column and seeking advice and comment.
I was told I was right.
“I don’t think running gets easier — at least not for me,” said Lisa Marie Neuhaus Duncan of Erlanger. “Every run is different, even if you do the same routes. The main reason is the weather — humid, rain, snow. … Some days you just have to say I had a bad run but will do better next time.”
But some told me I was very, very wrong — running isn’t hard; it’s thinking that running is hard makes it hard.
“Running is easy. We make it hard,” Emily Horseman of Independence told me. “We let our brains get too involved and sometimes we let them take over.”
Now, Em is a long-time, accomplished runner. She’s run more half-marathons and marathons than I can count. Heck, she’s planning to run a marathon a month this year, and in May, ran two marathons back-to-back on consecutive days in one weekend.
She trains hard, often putting in 8-minute miles over a stretch of double-digits miles. She works out. She runs hills and trails as well as the roads. So she’s no slacker.
But, she said, running also is the easiest when “you just go out and run and explore.”
“Slow when you want to, stop for water when you want to, go fast as you like it,” she said. “And leave with no time constraints on the run. You’ll find that it’s the easiest run you will ever have. When we restrain ourselves, and worry about nutrition or pacing or heart rate, how many calories we’re burning, or if we’re hitting the right times on the training plan — that’s what makes things hard. It bogs running down.
“Running does get easy,” she insisted. “We challenge ourselves and keep it hard — for good reasons. There’s nothing wrong with that. But sometimes, you have to remind yourself that once in awhile, running can just be fun. It doesn’t have to be the leveler. It doesn’t have to humble you every time you go out in order for it to be useful to you. It can just be something you do that day to experience and enjoy life.”
Well. So let me change my thesis: Running can be easy. It’s training and racing that is hard.
That seemed to go over better.
“Some of my favorite runs have been the ones where I forgot my watch and had to run on feel alone,” said ultra-runner Eric Kavalauskas of Edgewood. “Everyone should do this periodically.”
Indeed, said Carole Cilensek of Cincinnati, this would even include a race.
“My half (marathon) PR (personal record) was achieved on a day that my watch died at the start line,” she said. “I ran based on what my body had trained to do, not what my head was interpreting. … It doesn’t get easy because our heads won’t let it.”
Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere.
“I think running is hard if you push yourself to do more than you have been, whether that’s running faster or farther, or maybe adding hills to your route,” said Michael Leland, the news director of Iowa Public Radio in Des Moines, who used to work for our very own WNKU in Highland Heights. “For the last five years, I’ve been a two-to-four miles, two-or-three days a week runner, mainly for stress relief, weight control, and overall health.”
But then he got it into his mind to run a half-marathon, a race of 13.1 miles, more than he had run in 30 years.
“So I kept making my long runs longer, covering distances I hadn’t run since I was 18,” he said. “I topped out at nine miles and got on the bus to the start (of the race) wondering if this was such a good idea. I finished in under three hours, and it was definitely hard. What I realized wasn’t hard was making it to mile 3. As I passed that flag, I thought back to last August when I struggled to finish that distance, but now considered it pretty easy.
“So, running is as hard as we make it. … In a few days, I’ll be back on my weekday, 3.5-mile route through downtown and will be thinking about the day ahead and watching for cars, but definitely not thinking that it’s difficult.”
Paul Long writes weekly for the NKyTribune about running and runners. For his daily running stories, follow him at dailymile.com or on Twitter @Pogue57