Pain Is a Wonderful Teacher

Vol. 3, Issue 17

I deleted Instagram in September. I'll admit it's kind of lonely, but throughout the pandemic, Instagram has made me feel more inadequate and insecure than usual. Initially, it was over my failures as a parent, watching numerous friends post photos from their outdoor adventures to far-flung woodsy locales enjoying fire pits and archery and fly fishing. Was there a secret Airbnb menu I wasn't aware of?

A former coworker has two kids almost exactly the same age as ours. Their family drove cross-country to what looked like dozens of national parks in a two-week time period and, even though I hated myself every time I did so, I was constantly monitoring her feed. They toasted marshmallows and hugged gigantic trees. There was a beautiful photo of her large Nordic-looking husband carrying both children in each arm up a steep trail to watch the sunset over a ravine. Then there was an action shot of her serious-looking three-year-old son navigating a kayak through a lake by himself. I'm sure my kids could kayak by themselves, too, but it's not safe right now. But once this pandemic is over, they will soar!

I looked up from my phone just in time to watch my two-year-old daughter walk right into the dining room wall because the potty bowl she was wearing as a hat fell over her eyes.

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I was also jealous so many formerly lazy people I knew had now taken up running during the pandemic. And not just dumb little 5ks dressed up in turkey costumes – they were racking up serious mileage and on all sorts of terrain. It seemed like every other day a person I knew in a previous life as a drunken maniac or a chain-smoking cokehead had suddenly transformed themselves into an ultra-marathoner How did this happen? And what the hell is Strava?

Since I moved to LA, I've dicked around with running a few times, but I gave up once my lower body started to crumble. My knees hurt. My hips felt crunchy. Plus, I was convinced my lungs were filled with glass.

I had all the usual middle-aged complaints, plus a pathetic list of other excuses to never take running seriously: It's boring. Running on the road is dangerous. I have ZERO time. We're moving. We just moved. The world's population is about to be wiped out and I do not want to spend my final days on earth sloppily running on Griffth Park Boulevard in a cloth mask.

But as we spent more time separated from the outside world, I started to lean heavily into my routines – my meditation, the Zoom AA/Al-Anon meetings, therapy. Routines were keeping me sane. And that's when running became more appealing to me.

I started off sluggishly and still fell off a few weeks, but I kept at it. I bought new shoes. I bought knee sleeves. I bought some of those tight shiny long-sleeved shirts that look like a kid's Spiderman costume. I tried some of the Hal Higdon plans.

But I kept getting destroyed – I was out of breath very early in my runs. I asked my buddy Steve if I was completely hopeless. Then he gave me the most mind-blowing advice ever: "Go slower, man."

Huh. That was definitely part of my problem. I kept treating every run as if it were the NFL combine.

So I went slower, then I ran better. Go figure. And just yesterday I ran farther than I had in 25 years. It was wild.

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Before everyone gets too excited I would like to put it out there that I'm not training for anything. No 10ks, no half-marathons – no STRAVA. It's more about – you guessed it – another routine. But I've started to read up on other people's running journeys and finally get inspired by them, instead of jealous. There's my friend Steve, who I just mentioned. Edith, obviously.

And then there's Lindsay Crouse, who is a senior editor and writer for the New York Times, and today's interview subject. She wrote one of my favorite columns ever about her quest to qualify for the 2020 Olympic marathon trials.

"At 35, I thought I was “who I was.” I didn’t think it was still possible to improve significantly in anything, let alone something involving my body. Our culture is fixated on youth, on potential, on lists of “30 under 30” — especially for women, who are assigned a “biological clock,” whether they believe in it or not.

I had to dismantle all that. To qualify, I had to run a marathon pace of 6 minutes 17 seconds per mile. For me, that’s usually a sprint. When I started training on a path along the Hudson River, I couldn’t even hit that pace for one mile. I tried anyway, over and over. I would stagger home afterward, late at night or before work or both. Once, at the end of a workout, I cried out, “Oh, God!” so loudly that a man across the path looked up at me in alarm. But I kept trying, repeating something someone told me about “getting comfortable with the uncomfortable.” It never got comfortable."

She didn't qualify – but she did run a marathon faster than she ever had before. 

Then on Sunday, she published a surprising column about how she – of all people – had stopped running during the pandemic. 

The parallels between running and recovery are pretty obvious, but the one that comes to mind for me each run is the wait for tomorrow cliche: "If you want to drink today, don't. But you can drink tomorrow if you still want to."

I started using that on my runs anytime I feel like bailing:" I will finish this last mile and then quit tomorrow."

Today is today, though. I just need to get through this one today. But sometimes, when it feels as if my hip bones are about to disintegrate into a smoky pile of ash, I still bail.

Progress, not perfection. 

Read the interview with Lindsay in the feature pit down below. – AJD

This Shouldn't Be Brutal: An Interview with Lindsay Crouse

by The Small Bow

Dept. of Cardiovascular Activities

How do I know when I'm really hurt or just really out of shape?

When I was younger I would tell myself “mind over body,” or “Pain is temporary, pride is forever.” The message was that I just needed to push through anything mentally and my body would catch up. Sometimes, actually, that really is true. That’s good pain. It goes away the longer you work out. But bad pain is different — that’s when the harder you push, the worse it feels. It takes a certain kind of maturity to surrender to it, to say ok I don’t have total control over myself or my body, and it’s not even that I did something wrong, maybe it’s just bad luck. But I’ll still try to learn whatever I can from it while accepting that injuries and setbacks are part of the process. Nothing is linear.

One of my biggest hang-ups is the shame of not finishing. I tried to bump up my mileage recently but my feet turned into lead boulders about two miles before my end goal so I just bailed. It's been tough to get back out and continue. I feel like I maxed out.

I’ve realized recently that growing up I learned to never quit, no matter what. In college freshman year I had a syndrome that made my shins swell up and go numb but I lined up for a meet with my team one night in Texas anyway. I had already fallen into last place when I couldn’t feel the bottom of my legs anymore aside from burning but I kept my eyes up and told myself “10 more meters, you can do this” over and over and I did. I fell down at the finish, and when I got up I saw blood on my hands and knees where the skin had been. Under the floodlights, I told everyone I was fine — they moved on to another race and I went to wash myself off. I was proud of how tough I was. It only occurred to me this year, when I took a break, that this wasn't really a game – I was hurting myself.

It goes back to the question of injury; sometimes we are pushing our limits, and breaking into new arenas of what we can do. Other times, we’re hurting ourselves. It’s up to each of us to learn and respect those boundaries. At the end of the day, this shouldn’t be brutal. It should be satisfying. Maybe even fun.

How terrible is it for me to only run on the road? Should I make the extra effort to run on a different surface or just keep trudging along until I get a better routine?

I’m not a running coach but I run wherever I can — if I were picky about it I’m sure my marathons would be 30mins slower. There are maybe some things to be delicate about (the shoes you run in come to mind) but usually, I like to keep my focus on the actual hard part: pulling off the run itself.

I once had this embarrassing conversation with someone who runs frequently – I asked them if they were foot-strikers or heel-strikers or even something that made less sense and their advice was to not even bother with that stuff right now and just go run. The rest will come later, I guess. But I still don't have any idea if my form is correct.

Yeah, I have a feeling mine isn’t either. But I think that’s a lot better than forcing it into something unnatural (also, who wants to think about running while you’re doing it? The hardest part should be starting).

Do you think running is the best sport for severely depressed people? I didn't think so before I started getting halfway serious about it, but now I think I get it. But when does that runner's high happen because, honestly, that's all I'm in this for.

I can’t speak about what the right thing to do is if you’re severely depressed, but I do know that running gives you a sense of agency that can help serve as a jolt. I spent a lot of the pandemic frustrated, distracted, and glued to the couch. It felt like I was underwater, or asleep. But running helped me feel more like someone I remembered: myself.

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More good running resources if you want to get after it:
* The Halfmarathoner
* Chi Running
* Also, check out Lindsay's Twitter here.