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Posts tagged ‘running’

May 6

Boston Marathon 2023 Race Report

For my second marathon, I ran Boston. I had planned to run the Chicago Marathon in October, but I ran too long through a hamstring injury and ended up having to take off for about eight to ten weeks. I remember being thrilled to come just a little bit close to my marathon pace at the Thanksgiving Drumstick Dash in Indianapolis. My first ten miler was January 1 and I was slow. I ended up with a training block I could be proud of, but I only had time (in terms of weeks to build up and before the race) to get in two 20- or 22-mile long runs. This season I added heavy lifting twice a week, which helped with rehab and with those Boston hills. Because of the injury, I was slow in my recovery and long runs through the whole block. I saw myself running paces I had never seen before, dipping at times to about three minutes or more off my MGP. I was delighted to hear Nell Rojas say on the Running Rogue podcast that she often does long runs and recovery runs at 3+ her MGP. But it did kind of get in my head. I was still generally hitting paces in workouts, but I don’t think they were quite at the same intensity and it often took more reps to get to the target pace. All this to say, it was a return-from-injury training cycle. I knew that. But also, at the same time, last July, I couldn’t quite see myself in Chicago. Even before the injury took a bad turn, I didn’t see it. But I did see myself in Boston. My teammate from Rogue’s She Squad, Colleen Reutebuch gave me a book, 26.2 to Boston: A Journey into the Heart of the Boston Marathon, when I qualified at CIM. Each chapter is the history and the terrain of each mile. When I read it, I could see myself there. I read it again this winter as well as every other podcast I could get my hand on that described the feel of the race and I could continue to see myself running those streets from Hopkinton to Boyleston.

I had a race plan that I thought was doable, but aggressive. I didn’t quite nail it, but I did BQ at Boston. And now I’m processing what I experienced and what I learned.

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Feb 17

Why Running Needs Socialism

I’ve gotten pretty serious about running. I’m climbing my way to 60-mile weeks this spring. (Yes, I know #beepboop, I can’t stop.) As I’ve been getting more and more serious, I’ve been immersing myself more in the running world – reading books, listening to podcasts (Running Rogue is my favorite, driven as they are by the commitment to elite principles for the everyday runner; I also enjoy the Clean Sport Collective, and Indiana native Lindsey Hein gives great interviews on I’ll Have Another), buying gear (so many things, but this and this are my fave). As I’ve been getting more and more serious about running, I’ve realized that the language, commitments, and ideology of capitalism extend even to running. I mean of course they do, but it isn’t immediately obvious.

So I’ve been thinking about what it might mean to run like a socialist. What I have concluded is that the capitalist funding structure of running in which athletes seek corporate sponsors to ‘go professional’ does not serve the sport well. As a philosopher I like to look for the root of problems. I think you can see what’s happening in an institution or a community by the problems it faces. One of the perhaps defining problems of running as a sport is doping and the question of which technologies to make athletes faster are fair. These problems, I maintain, can be traced back to the profit motive upon which capitalism rests. I think it is clear that the sport of running, and perhaps sport in general, will struggle to deal with pressures to dope as long as the funding structures for athletes are corporate sponsorships, a structure specific to a capitalist regime. Further, the arguments in the service of anti-doping fall short as long as they appeal to principles that perpetuate the ideologies of capitalism: hard work not resources is the source of success alongside a recourse to the natural.

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Jan 1

Exercising Under Neoliberalism

This post originally appeared on Fit is a Feminist Issue and is crossposted with permission.

The strange algorithms of Facebook brought Sam B’s post from several years ago–“Am I really lapping people on the couch?”–to my feed last week.  People like to talk about their athletic efforts and workout regimes in terms of how they are doing better than other people.  At the yoga studio where I practice they regularly say at the end of class, “You did more in the last hour than most people will do this entire day.”  This sentiment  suggests that I did something worthwhile because it was better than what other people are doing.

But I hesitate to just blame my fellow athletes for thinking about our physical efforts in this way.  This way of thinking is exercising under neoliberalism.  If liberalism underwrites capitalism through the idea that individuals bear responsibility for their position in the world and private property requires the protection of the government, resistance to liberalism came from workers organizing for their rights against the ownership class.  Neoliberalism demands that workers be considered as individuals, not as a collective with shared interests.  If labor opposed capital under liberalism by arguing that labor is the source of wealth production, under neoliberalism workers themselves are viewed as human capital, and as human capital, of being responsible for their own precarious situation that being workers puts them in.  As human capital, the workers bear their own risks.  Under liberalism, workers could demand that working conditions be improved to protect them because they argued that their well-being was necessary for wealth production.  Under neoliberalism, workers are made responsible for the conditions. Read more

Jan 26

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Writing, Running and Yoga: The Pain and Possibility of Perseverance

Monday night I went to a high intensity interval training pilates class.  During my third minute of elbow planks, I thought I was going to cry.  I cried once when I was running a half marathon, when in the last half mile I realized I was going to PR.  There’s something about that moment when you think you are reaching your threshold and you just cannot do anymore and then you keep doing it.  That moment is where you realize the struggle is mental.

I’m reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.  It also brings me close to tears.  Murakami makes me feel guilty for the times I have stopped because of the pain. He makes me feel bad for being a mid-distance runner and not a long-distance runner.  In the pilates class, which is grueling and unlike any pilates I have ever heard of, the teacher berates us for giving up.  I understand that.  Motivate, push yourself.  That’s all good.  But I had to learn to pay attention to pain in running and to take it easy–to do what looks like giving up, to stop feeling the exercise as demand.

At one point Murakami talks about the one time he ran an ultramarathon. After mile 34 his breathing felt good but his legs wouldn’t work, so he had to propel himself my moving his arms and hands.  Then at mile 47, he broke through a wall.  It stopped hurting.  He kept going.  He ran the next fifteen miles unencumbered.  I think I know that feeling.  It happens for me three minutes into an elbow plank.  It’s when you realize that you can persist through the pain if you tell yourself to just keep on. Read more

Jan 13

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Running, Hot and Cold

When I lived in South Texas, where I took my running up another level, I got used to running in the heat.  In serious heat.  Summers could run more than 100 days with temperatures over 100 degrees.  We used to say there was a warm season and a windy season, which was also warm, but with wind.  I think my blood thinned.  It was hard.  I would have to work on drinking enough water every day to make sure that I didn’t get dehydrated.  I would feel sticky just walking out the front door.  But I rarely decided not to run just because of the heat.  I’d just wait for the sun to go down (which let’s be honest, didn’t help that much).

Since moving to Indiana, I’ve been running in the cold.  The real cold.  I ran the Jingle Bell 10k in Indy in the middle of December in below freezing temperatures.  I ran fast–for me.  I even won something.  img_1448The week before Christmas, I was in Spokane and ran everyday in below freezing temperatures on snow and in snow.  It was amazing.  Unlike running in the heat which feels to me like a sap on my energy, running in the cold is invigorating.  It wakes you up.  Cold running makes me happy.  Maybe because running releases the hormones that combat depression that winter often makes us prone to with the shorter days and the grayer weather.  I’ve been running on snow and ice in both Indiana and most recently in Spokane, Washington and find that running in the snow and ice slows you down but is an amazing core workout because you have to work those muscles just to stay upright.  img_0438

My first winter in Indiana I was not thrilled by the idea.  I ran on treadmills, but I don’t like the treadmill.  It doesn’t let me adjust my pace the way I would like to, the way that allows me to respond to my body and do what feels good, as I discuss here.  But it was so cold!  I invested in some gear: I bought a running hat and running gloves, more warm running clothes, I already had a running windbreaker.  With the right gear, I feel pretty good out there until about 15º and below (once, running outside my phone stopped working and said it was overheated, but since it was 10º outside, I decided that that’s the only temperature-related notice they have).  A colleague suggested doing a short five minute workout in my house so that I would already be warmed up before going outside, so I started doing that.  But still, there were days that I just chickened out because of the cold.

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Me after the Indy Jingle Bell 10k

I’ve been thinking about cold running because I have returned to hot yoga in the last week–I’ve gone everyday for the last five days.  When I first started doing yoga in graduate school it was at a Baptiste hot power yoga studio in University City in Philadelphia.  I liked the workout.  I would smell myself sweating out the toxins.  But boy is it hot (Bikram yoga, which is the bread and butter of this studio, puts the heat at about 105º with 40% humidity).  With this return to hot yoga in the context of a cold running routine, I’m not nearly as excited by the heat as I used to be.  It’s great.  I like the sweat.  But I don’t know.  Maybe it’s because I’m twelve or fifteen years older than the last time I did real hot yoga.  Maybe it is because this studio is really not messing around about the heat.  Maybe the heat just makes you think about cold.  Maybe it’s because after a cold run my lungs feel bigger, like all the cold air rushed in and hasn’t left, while hot yoga makes me feel like I am never quite getting enough air.  Instead of feeling like a respite from the cold, the hot yoga has me missing cold runs.

I never thought I’d be looking forward to the cold runs.  But here I am.  Beep beep boop.

Jan 22

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Day 22: On Running and Being a Runner, Pt. 3

At a certain point in my running life, maybe in my second year living in Texas, when I was running 5-7 days a week, I began to experience running as a demand.  I was unhappy with myself if I didn’t get a run in.  I’d make sure to run in the morning if I had an event in the evening or I’d go home and run between work and evening activities.  If I didn’t, I felt guilty.  Often, when I was visiting family or at a conference, I wouldn’t have the time or the wherewithal to run and then I’d feel like I was not really a runner.  People would ask at these times how my running was going and I, knowing that I hadn’t run in three days, would feel like an imposter of a runner when I said, really well, thanks.  Then I’d acknowledge sheepishly that I hadn’t run in three days.  I don’t think I realized that people were giving me odd looks because that did not seem to them to have any bearing on whether I was really a runner or not.

At one point in 2011, I think it was, I ran a hundred days in a row or so.  I can’t remember how many days it was, which I consider to be a sign of my mental health regarding running, because there was a time when I was pretty obsessive about knowing how many days in a row it had been on any given day.

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Jan 21

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Day 21: On Running and Being a Runner, Pt. 2

I just got back from a run outside.  It’s 25 degrees.  I would so much rather run outside, if it’s say, over 20 degrees, than run on a treadmill.  Last winter was the first winter I got serious about running outside and it was awesome-sauce, as the Greeks say.  There’s just something about being outside that spurs me on, while to be honest, it’s easier for me to give up on a treadmill.  And even though I’ve been running 3-7 days a week for about twenty years (which you can read about in Pt. 1 of this series), I still give up sometimes.  Especially on treadmills.  There’s two things I don’t like about treadmills.  The first is associated with one of the greatest fears every runner has: forgive me for being graphic, the treadmill makes my bowels seem looser and the possibility losing control of them more looming than running outside.  I can’t really explain why this is the case, but it does make me feel like that.  I speculate that it’s something about the way the belt gives in, nah, ok, I really don’t know.  But anyway, that happens.  I don’t like it.

The other thing about treadmills is that I don’t feel like I can adapt my pace and my stride to whatever is happening with my body in the moment on a treadmill.  That work of adapting my body and paying attention to my body to make microadjustments as I run became important to me after reading two books, Chris McDougall’s Born to Run and Matt Fitzgerald’s Brain Training for Runners. While McDougall’s book gives the larger anthropological and evolutionary account of why that’s important, Fitzgerald’s gives the specific advice about how to do it well. Read more

Jan 20

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Day 20: On Running and Being a Runner, Pt. 1

I have yet to blog about running.  Once I talked about what I saw and thought on a run, but it wasn’t blogging about running.  The next couple days I’m going to make up for that because it turns out I have a lot to say about running.  I am a runner.  In this post, I’m going to tell you my personal running story.

I wasn’t always an athlete.  I remember one day sitting on the bleachers at my older sister’s indoor soccer game and my friend’s mom asked me if I played any sports.  My friend, a guy who was a little older than my sister, said, “She doesn’t play sports.  She flirts.”  I think I was 12.  Maybe 13.  I think I’m still probably running out of rage about that comment. Read more