We did the Parks Run Whose Names Are Myriad this weekend! (AKA “The Too Many Parks/Too Much Recreation NoPo Fun Run 2013” AKA “Operation Serial Park 3.”) It was looking like we’d have a somewhat larger crew this time, but things came up for a lot of folk and it ended up being three humans and a dog.
It was awesome, and it was also the longest distance I’ve ever run, I think. Prior to this, my longest was a 9.5 miler I did by accident (I went to Woodlawn Park and then almost went to Washington); prior to that, my longest was last year’s 8.5 miler. Our route was to hit 17 parks in 10 miles, although we went off-route enough that it ended up being almost 11 miles. Here’s our planning map, and since Eric had a tracker running on his telephone, here’s what we actually did. (The vertical plunge at the end isn’t a glitch, Baltimore Ave is some silly shit.)
Mind you, we weren’t rolling the way I assume they do in a legit half-marathon or whatever; we were stopping to smell the roses, like you’re supposed to do on a parks run. But I’m feeling actually kind of badass about the whole experience, and am wondering what I should do next. I felt good at the end, and I bet I could have managed another few miles.
On Running
Running is funny for me. I’m not even sure how to start explaining what’s up with running. Should I, even?
I used to consider it some kind of virtuous exercise — like, a Thing You Should Do To Keep In Shape — and now I don’t. Mostly I think I didn’t understand the difference between cardio and strength training until like my mid to late twenties, then I learned how to run better, and then I learned some actual things about how my kit works, particularly about how my body changes its distribution of muscle mass at the slightest provocation (I pack it on fast & I lose it fast) and how I’ll basically be in significant pain during any given work week unless I pump iron. And once that all came together, I realized that lifting is my proper and natural form of exercise, that running actually drains away my muscle mass, and that achieving anything more than like three miles at 6 MPH was pretty much a waste of my time.
And then I kind of got into running.
Like any chronology, this is a lie, because I don’t know how to explain that one summer when it felt like I was always out running with Chris and Elizabeth. The Pile of Broken Machines in the Field Year. Honestly that one still feels like an episode from the movie version of someone else’s life. (Hi, Elizabeth.) But at some point, running by myself without anyone else’s energy to feed off of became fun, when it hadn’t been fun before.
Everyone’s been passing around this comic from The Oatmeal this month, and obviously I’m not at his level (50mi, whoa), and less obviously not all of his reasons to run apply to me. But the main point certainly obtains — running is not about what the culture at large keeps claiming running is about. It’s sort of about taking a vacation from being a modern human. Or it’s sort of about being a modern something-other-than-human, or about being a plain-jane unaugmented human navigating modern spaces designed for augmented humans. (This is where you can tell I don’t go running in the desert or whatever.) It adjusts the resolution of reality — by running through an area you’ve driven through or even biked, you’ll see things you were not expecting to see, in a density that seems impossible. It’s a wonder and disorientation transfusion. And because it takes so long to get around, it ends up splitting my consciousness — I can be both hyper-present and mind-wanderey at the same time, listening intensely to music and inhabiting any number of fictional spaces I’ve been trying to decode.
So yeah, nowadays running is closer to a guilty pleasure than some kinda fitness obligation.
Anyway:
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