Getting Started

My book is called, "How to Get Running and Stay Running." It will be available from waly press some day. I just have to figure out when I've reached the point where I can say, I stayed running. I don't think I'm there yet. We'll see.

Not to spoil the suspense, but one of the biggest traps for me with running is setting goals. It's not that goals don't motivate me . . . they totally do. But it's when I fail to reach a goal that's the dangerous thing. I see it as a failure and my instinct is to say, "Well then just screw it. If I can't do what I set out to do, then I just give up." I know I'm not alone in this feeling. And it's perfectly natural, especially if you try hard at something and still don't make it. It makes you feel helpless and hopeless.

As a way to overcome this tendency, when I started running again a couple of years ago, I set incredibly realistic goals and I gave myself permission to quit. At first, it was in a year. "If I don't get to where I can run 10 miles--I really don't even remember what it was--in a year, then I give myself permission to quit." But I didn't. Within a year I was running ten miles and I had no intention or inclination to quit.

It's also frustrating not to get super skinny. All I want to do is look like a 20-year-old Abercrombie model. Is that too much to ask! So when I somehow don't wind up looking like that, I have to make a deal with myself. "If I'm not looking like a six-pack stick boy in a year, then I give myself permission to quit running."

By then I'll probably be at least a little skinnier, which will encourage me to give it at least another year.

Stepping on Tiny Objects and Running Supercomputers

When I'm tooling along, I sometimes get lost in the incredible, mind-bending realization that my mind is making these incredible calculations about where my foot is going to land next. There's a tree root eight feet yonder. No worries. My I'm landing five inches shy of it. And I do. Wow. How did I know that? Supercomputer at work, I'm telling you.

But sometimes my lil' noggin goes to work turning calculations purely for entertainment purposes. Sometimes when I'm walking along the sidewalk, I try to time my steps so the toe of my shoes hit exactly on the edge of the crack (thereby protecting my mother's back while generating a little suspense at the same time). I really do it just to see if I can, and it's not easy to get it exactly right, but I can get within four or five inches every time.

Another odd little thing I do is step on tiny objects I see on the trail. Sometimes I do it to see if I can, but other times it's just to see what will happen. I was really curious about what kind of noise a bottle cap I saw on the trail this morning would make if I clipped the edge of it. I did, and it made the exact sound I predicted in my head. It was kind of eerie. How did I know all that. Supercomputer.

One thing my Deep Blue of a brain can't do, however, is make myself go much faster when I start to crash. There seems to be some kind of automatic slow mode it makes my body go into when I start to go into distress, which happens all the time, as going into distress is the very purpose and nature of running! Physiologists say we can milk a lot more performance out of our bodies than our brain lets us milk. Then again, it can hit get my foot to clip the exact edge of a 3/4-inch bottle cap at 11 miles per hour on a gravel trail. Maybe it knows something about max performance we haven't figured out yet.