Eulogy for My Running Life

Note: In the wee hours of this early morning when I couldn't sleep, I turned to words as a way to clear my mind. I haven't written on this blog in a long time, but this seemed as good a home as anywhere for what follows.  

I’ve spent the better part of 30 years exploring the world with my feet at a 9-10 mile per hour pace. I’m no rabbit; I’m a tortoise. And I always finished the race until yesterday when I hung up my running shoes.

For me, running has been a solitary pleasure. I occasionally ran with someone else — my husband, a friend, the thousands who joined me in 5K, 10K and other road races — but prefer going it alone.

I run not to win a race, gain a promotion or a client, or stay ahead of other women my own age (well, maybe just a little when I enter a organized running event). Instead, I just attempt to best the previous day's time by a few seconds. I try to increase my distance just a tad every once in a while. My competition is with myself instead of others.

I run for the run.

I’ve never am accompanied by music. I run for the quiet and private time. I like to run the same path repeatedly so that I don’t have to think about my steps and can instead go inward into my mind to find inspiration, solutions to problems and calmness. I don’t mind doing laps around tracks. Sometimes I just rhythmically count my steps, not to find out how many I took but as a sort of meditation mantra. The fact is, I never pay attention to the number I’m on at any particular moment, and I tend to stop and start randomly. Sometimes I run to spy. I love going through neighborhoods, trying to imagine what people do and hoping in the evening dusk that front window lights will be on giving me a clearer glimpse into their lives during the few seconds it takes to pass their houses. I run to de-stress. I’ve lost count of the times my husband said to me that I really ought to go out for a run because it would do me a world of good. I run to be able to eat more food and drink more wine.

As I lay in bed last night unable to sleep, I began to think about how my history and my running intertwine. At midnight I got out of bed and started writing.

1978 — Gainesville, Florida. My first steps as a runner coincided with when I became a freshman at the University of Florida when running was an inexpensive way to get out of my room and be alone away from irritating roommates. At that time just down the street from Tolbert dorm, a trail wound through the woods. I never knew what I’d see… a snake crossing the path or a frat boy lost in his own solitary pleasure behind a tree that was too scrawny to give him the privacy he wanted (or didn’t want – I didn’t stop to ask). Apparently a running bug bit me somewhere in those woods.

1982 — Lawton, Oklahoma. Our temporary one-bedroom apartment with rented furniture and a tiny B&W television with rabbit ears was claustrophobic and ugly. I had no friends and no job, and my Army husband was gone all day learning how to shoot cannons. I hadn’t tied the sneaker laces in quite a while when I decided to give it another try. I could not make it around the block. The next day, I started running and picked out a mailbox down the road and said to myself that if I made it that point, I could walk. The next time out, I made a new bargain with a light pole a few steps farther than the mailbox. The next thing I knew, I was around the block and could venture down the country roads. This sort of goal setting turned out to work well for me for the next three decades.

1982-1984 — Leesville, Louisiana. I started a new job as a newspaper reporter about the same time morning sickness hit me like a brick. Not the best combo for a runner, but I kept at it. At about 6 months, my growing girth made jogging uncomfortable, so I switched to walking. When Katherine was born and I was given the OK to hit the streets, I anxiously waited with my running shoes tied for Frank’s arrival at the door each evening. I loved being a stay-at-home mom but so needed claim 30 minutes for myself each early evening. No baby cries. Quiet. Sanity. I repeated the running/walking/escape process when Briana, our second daughter, came along less than two years after Katherine.

1985 — West Palm Beach, Florida. With two babies 19 months apart in age and in another new city where I knew nobody, my runs continued. My goal was the same as in Louisiana: To gain 20-30 minutes of time to myself. I also began to see how the other half lived. We lived in a rent four-plex just down the road and across the tracks from the Palm Beach Polo Club. I cranked up neighborhood gawking to a new level on those runs.

1986 — Lawton, Oklahoma. Our short six-month return to Oklahoma was during tornado season. If the warning sirens went off while I was running, I’d head back home at full speed. I think this is why my pace began to improve. I also learned to vault over the tarantulas that scooted out from the grass. They were everywhere that summer.

1986-1990 — Eichen, Germany. For most of the time we lived in Germany, we rented a house in a rural farming village that had a single stoplight. I think I was the only runner in that town. I could go through a 900-year-old arch at the end of my street, past barns and fields, and find heavenly trails that wound through the woods. The smell of fresh manure, which sometimes brought tears to my eyes because it was so intense, stayed close to the ground in the early morning fog. I never ran before the light came up though, as too many humongous slugs and snails risked crossing the sidewalks and streets at that time of day. Take my word for it, a squished slug between running shoe tread is disgusting. I ran my first 10K (6.1 miles) in Hanau the day before we moved back to the United States. I finished without walking.

1990-1993 — Huntington, West Virginia. We lived in a small subdivision outside of town, so running options were limited to laps around its five or so streets. Leash laws were non-existent, so my biggest challenge was of the canine variety. Snowball was a big white lab who freely roamed the neighborhood. He’d join me on a run until a car came along, and then he’d take off like a wild banshee nipping at the car’s fenders. I would try to signal to the startled driver in the car that Snowball wasn’t my dog, but I don’t think I was believed. The other notable dog in the neighborhood was a barking small Eskimo-type dog named Lady who was downright mean. She’d come after me with bared, snapping teeth. I took to running with my daughter’s silver baton. When Lady got too close, I’d swing the baton at her until she backed off. When Lady wasn’t around, I practiced twirling while running. Not being from West Virginia and not having the appropriate accent had already marked me as an outsider, so what the hell, why not add twirling to my already-tainted reputation.

1993-1997 — Harker Heights, Texas. I became friends with Anne when our kids took swimming lessons together. I’d often use the time they were in lessons for a quick run. After one of those runs, Anne’s son Danny came up to me and proudly announced that his mom, the lady with the red hair sitting over there in the shade, had once run a marathon. I’d been toying with the idea and stuck up a conversation with Anne. We made plans to run the White Rock Marathon in Dallas that December. Summers in Central Texas are brutally hot during the day, so my runs had to start long before the sun came up and before I went to work. I’d strap a water bottle around my waist and hit the roads. I learned to love the pre-dawn smell of cedar trees and dust that permeates that part of Texas. Anne and I went to Dallas together, minus kids and husbands. We ate pasta at the carbo-loading party the night before and were up early to get to the start line. We both finished. I ran 26 miles in 4 hours and 20ish minutes, and then drove Anne and myself the 2-1/2 hours it took to get home though I could barely walk. I’ll never forget that day. It stands in my mind as one of my greatest accomplishments, and I love the look I still get when I tell people I once ran a marathon. The ribbon I was handed at the finish line is hanging today on the bulletin board right behind my desk. (I’ll be back to Anne in 2011.)

1997-1998 — Lansing, Kansas. Ten months in one town. The golf lessons didn’t take, so I kept running after I got home in work. I’d try to get in a few miles several times a week except when it snowed. I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. When it snows, people should stay inside unless skis or a sled is involved, or if they face a risk of being fired for not showing up for work.

1998-2002 — Baumholder, Germany. All I have to say is that the hills in Baumholder are damn wicked if you’re running or driving a stick shift. I did both. The car thing was a piece of cake, and I looked good when Frank bought me a red Audi TT to mark my 40th birthday in 2000. My running, though, was downright ugly. But I didn’t care what I looked like as long as I didn’t have to walk to the top of that ridiculous hill on my street. That would have been an embarrassing defeat because I knew just about everyone (friends, friends of my kids, my students from the college courses I taught, soldiers in my husband’s unit) who drove by or looked out windows. A ski injury sidelined me for a while, but I was soon back at it both on the running trails and on the ski slopes. Some call me hardheaded; I prefer dedicated.

2002-2003 — Cedar Park, Texas. Didn’t I say earlier that I loved the smell of cedar in the morning before the sun rose and the traffic thickened? The smell was still there when we returned to Texas. This suburb of Austin was made for running with wide sidewalks and friendly pre-dawn walkers who also wanted to beat the white-hot heat that would crush down on us when the sun rose. In the dark when deer startled me, I prayed not to be knocked down like the runner in the old Geico commercials. I survived.

2003-2005 — Harker Heights, Texas. Running kept me sane while my girls were in Virginia attending James Madison University, Frank was at a base outside Baghdad, Iraq, dodging landmines and rocket grenades for a full year, and I was alone in Texas with my family about a thousand miles away in Florida. I worked, I went to the funerals of Frank’s soldiers who died in the desert and I ran. And ran. And ran. Sometime numb legs and a numb brain are good things.

2005 to May 9, 2011 — Largo, Florida. Back in Florida where I started my running life will be the last place I run. Florida running is like no where else. In the spring, the air is cool and the orange blossoms bloom with a smell that is so heavy and intoxicating that it can make me dizzy. During summer mornings, the humidity is so thick that my lungs feel as though they are drowning with each inhale. I never have to worry about snow in the winter. I went a couple of years without running here. My Achilles tendons never seemed to get better. My knees hurt more than they had in the last 10 years. I worked so many hours that I’d collapse on the sofa in exhaustion when I got home from my 40-mile commute. I felt like crap and something had to change. So I left my job to start my own business where a commute to the office meant walking across the living room. I had time to go to a physical therapist and get my heels feeling better. I started to run again. I kept the distance in check, working up to 2-3 miles a few times a week and never two days in a row. And although the running still hurt my knees and ankles, my psyche and self-esteem felt good again. I signed up for a 5K (3.1 mile) St. Patty’s Day Fun Run in March through downtown Largo, the town where I was born 51 years ago. And Anne came to the run. My friend Anne, with whom I ran my first and only marathon, and her husband Dan made it to the starting line from their home on the other side of Tampa in time to run this dinky little race in downtown Largo. So it was Diane, Anne, Frank and Dan. We all ran. We got our t-shirts. We went to dinner in our running clothes, ate Italian food and drank wine. We laughed. I didn’t know it would be my last race.

A week ago for no apparent reason my right knee went wacky. Something was not right, so I got the X-ray and MRI, and went to visit a sports orthopedic doctor yesterday. His words were not understated: “Your knee is in really bad shape.” Apparently I’m beyond the repair stage with areas devoid of cartilage, so the only options right now are to try and control the pain and delay ongoing disintegration. He stuck a large needle of cortisone into the space behind my kneecap and said to come back in six weeks. He said if I run, I’m just hastening the inevitable knee replacement procedures that may be able to be held in bay until I’m in my 60s, if I’m lucky. Bike, he says. Get on an elliptical. Swim.

As I said earlier, I may be crazy but I’m not stupid.

I am no longer a runner.

Just like that.

I’ll ride the damn bike.

To non-runners, this all may sound silly and melodramatic. After all, it’s not like I was given a cancer diagnosis or am losing my sight or have developed Alzheimer’s disease. It's running, for God's sake. 

Still, a little something in me died yesterday. The runner me.

I’m planning my running swan song for Thursday morning. The cortisone should be fully kicked in at that point, so I’ll take four Advil, lace up my Saucony shoes and take a final lap through Eagle Lake Park in the early morning — just me, the trees, and my breath breaking the silence of my surroundings.

I won’t write about it.