About
Once a runner, always a runner. That’s a stupid little saying I happen to honestly believe.
Unfortunately, for myself and many former high school and collegiate runners, there comes a day when you just don’t have the time you once had, and then you suddenly find out how quickly time catches up to you.
One day you can run and run and the miles fly by and you laugh and you sing inside and you love every minute of it. Sure, there’s torture and pain and the monkey on your back when you push yourself to go farther and faster, but there is music in it, too. You are invincible. You can eat whatever you want and never gain a pound. You are a furnace, stoked full and blazing, and you’re always ready to churn out a run at the drop of a hat and anyone ahead of you on the road or track is another victim to reel in and then blow right by.
Then comes the day when working for a living takes precedence. You’ve got a family to feed, a car payment to make, a mortgage to pay, kids get sick. You find the time to squeeze in a run now and then, but the demands of your responsibilities slowly expand until there is neither the time nor the energy to lace up your shoes and take to the roads anymore.
You find you’re gaining weight. You never walk anywhere because you’re always in too big of a hurry. So much to do, so little time. Gotta get there quicker. Gotta get there now — so it’s always by car. Soon, you find that climbing multiple flights of stairs becomes a chore. You get winded after a short jog. You start to think of sitting quietly in front of that one-eyed monstrosity in your living room as recreation, and the muscles and joints start to settle into their new, less-demanding roles, and the weight continues to pile on. Inertia sets in, and in a bad way. You have gone from a body in motion to become a body at rest and you tend to remain at rest.
Then you wake up one day to realize you’ve become old and fat. You weigh seventy pounds more than you did when you were running in high school. You buy a pair of jeans and you note that your waist measures greater than your inseam now. You’re on a head-on collision course with adult-onset diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and a host of other ailments that prey on the sedentary and overweight.
And, if you’re like me, you take a good long look at where you started and where you’ve wound up and you don’t like it. Not one damned bit. You know in your heart that you should’ve — always could’ve — kept doing what you loved, but you took the easy way out and let your best years get behind you.
So, one fine morning you decide the time is come to change things. You lace up your shoes and you go out for a run, only you can’t run. You’re too heavy for your joints to support you through the stresses that running places on your body. Your joints ache, your muscles protest after barely a block, but you try to push on. You shuffle along at a pace that once you laughed at when you saw others doing it. You have become a mere shadow of your former self. And you hate yourself for letting yourself down all those years. And you know you have nobody to blame but yourself.
But you remember. Once you were a runner. Once your heart soared when you simply crossed a cinder track. Once you saw a runner in the distance and your pulse quickened, and you knew, at a glance, whether you could take him or not — and what’s more, you wanted to try. In your mind, you’re still there. In your heart, you’re still 18 and weigh exactly two pounds per inch of your height. You just trapped that runner you were beneath layers of blubber and smothered the run right out of him. Yet he’s still there. And he wants you to peel back the pounds and let him loose to tear up the roads again.
But those days are gone. You wasted “the gift.” You set it aside long ago and you’re never going to get it back. You have to be content to go slower, to settle for far less than the potential you once possessed. Where you once ran, you now jog — if you can even manage that, else you walk. But walking gets the job done for your health and dropping some weight. If you’re lucky, you may run again. Slower than in the races in your memories, but running nonetheless.
This blog is about my decision to come back to running and how I’m going about getting there. I’m not anywhere near there yet. I’m a walker right now and that’s all I’ll be for a while to come. I want to run. I need to run. But my body isn’t ready for what my mind tells me to do. I’m here to talk about this task I’ve set before myself. I will laugh and I will cry, but I will run again.
Because, you see, I really do believe… Once a runner, always a runner.
