When I was nine years old I would jog with my father. He was an avid jogger who even finished a marathon back when we lived in Cincinnati. I never went great distances with him, and I’m sure I slowed him down, but the peak of my jogging experience was running with him in an actual race down by Riverfront Stadium. He swears it was a 5k though I remember it as being a slightly-shorter 2.5 miles. What I do remember is that it was raining like hell, and that my division was “14 and under”, so all those boys on the brink of puberty flat smoked me.
I don’t know that I loved doing it so much as it was a way to spend time with my Dad. I remember one time he tried to play Nintendo with me, too, set let it not be said we didn’t try to find common ground.
That was effectively my last experience with jogging outside of gym class in middle school. Once in my mid-20’s I had this idea that I was going to stop at a local high school and run laps before heading to work – I went twice and after jogging one quarter-mile lap felt so terrible I walked the rest of the mile. Between that and my sore knee, my confidence that I could do this at all was pretty much zero.
But a few months back, I took a gamble and successfully jogged a mile on the treadmill. And then 1.5 miles. Suddenly it was becoming a viable alternative to the stair climber, and “I can run a mile!” was one of those sentences I could carry around in the back of my brain for reassurance that I wasn’t completely failing at Life.
Still, the fact that 9-year-old me could not only run further but faster than adult me does nag. I know that jogging has incredible benefits, but at incredible costs; the brutality of its impact is the reason I have stuck to ellipticals, climbers, and bikes for all my cardio work. I would like, though, to run a real 5k as a grown-up; it is shimmering into view on my Bucket List. I’m sure I couldn’t do it today, but I can make progress.
Last week, I challenged myself to two miles, and I made it. It was a slow two miles – I won’t lie, it took 19 minutes – but my pace was steady all the way through. It was easily the furthest I’ve run continuously as an adult, and that 5k felt more within reach.
One great benefit of exercise is that you become much better at making a physical self-inventory; you can feel what’s going right and wrong in your body. From a pure impact standpoint I could tell that I wouldn’t have wanted to go much further than those two miles in my present condition; especially since a decent numbing endorphin rush was stubbornly out of reach. My heartrate was also higher than I’d like – a sign of me pushing my own limits. But my wind was good, and my muscles, while sore, had more fight in them. Even that old bad knee was cooperating.
So even though Thanksgiving weekend was given over to turkey and sloth, and even though I have struggled to make a gym routine around this latest job, I had real confidence that I could keep courting this ambition…as soon as I got around to exercising again.
Now those are some dangerous words.
Last night I forced myself to the gym without a lot of real enthusiasm; just frustration that I kept not going for so many boring, surmountable reasons. Again the stair climbers were all occupied, and so I decided to go be all ambitious and test myself on the treadmill again.
Bad times ensued. Within the first few steps I could feel that the impact pains in my ankles were still there from the jog six days ago. Yes, I’m weak. For awhile I gritted through it. But things got critical around .8 miles – I felt my whole core cramping up, and my breath was getting shallow. I had no idea what was going wrong, but things that had never stopped me from jogging this year were stopping me from jogging. I muscled my way to a mile then stopped, and felt like a big, aching pile of useless.
I went on to do my complement of strength exercises, then made up some of the calories I intended to burn while jogging on the exercise bike; but I found myself morosely reviewing the feedback from my body, trying to figure out just why today was so much harder than other days. That my joints weren’t recovered was obviously a factor; and maybe a sign that that 5k will be more difficult than I imagined, because I have to train my body not just to do it, but to recover from doing it quickly enough to countenance doing it again in a few days.
Was it the food I ate two hours before? Was the temperature in the gym just a little higher? Is my metabolism wobbling from my reduced exercise load of the last month? Maybe all, maybe none; and this is the breakthrough obsessives like me sometimes need – maybe it just wasn’t my day. And the fact that it wasn’t my day can’t stop me from going back.