Running and Self-Aggrandizement

I've noticed that everywhere I look, people are out to make themselves feel better, bigger, smarter, healthier, and faster than others. They seem to need a sense of their uniqueness, and they promote their abilities and downplay those of others in order to do this. I see this on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and every other social media outlet.  Images of people running across steep mountain tops state things like "The miracle isn't that I finished, but that I started" or "Always earned, never given" (race medals and bibs) or "people ask why I run. It's something only those select few will understand...".

Come on! Lots of people run. Millions of people run. We are not a select group of heroes doing something selfless. Running is one of the most selfish things we do. It's purely about ourselves. I struggled with this at first, doing something so selfish that seemed to benefit no one else. But I have come to accept the selfish side of me after so many years of being decidedly unselfish.

Today, I feel l deserve the time I spend everyday communing with nature, talking to myself, listening to my body. I used to try to justify this to myself or attempt to  find ways to offset it.  I thought that if I ran for charitable causes it would at least be an activity I did for a higher purpose. I felt terrible doing this solely for me. My life hadn't been about me for such a long time that I just couldn't cope with the idea of being self-centered.

But I guess other people don't have a problem with this. Not only do they do these selfish acts of self-improvement, they then feel the need to point it out to the world and make themselves stand out. They say things like 'I ran 4 miles this morning. How many 50 year olds can do this?"

Well, a lot of 50 year olds can and do run 4 miles. It's not a miraculous thing, but more importantly why is it necessary for you to be unique in this? I know that I am a middle of the pack runner. In large races, I come in dead center of my age group of 40-45 females. I am not particularly fast nor am I particularly slow. Lots of women my age run, and 50% percent of those women run faster than me. There is nothing to brag about here.

Do I want to set myself apart from the pack? Sometimes, but not often.  I don't feel a need to draw attention to myself. I don't need to be the fastest, sexiest, funniest, or any other superlative, in the race. I just need and want to run. I want to finish. I would like to finish faster than I did the last time I ran the distance. If I don't, I won't belittle myself. I will just spend more time tweaking my running plans and trying new exercises or breathing patterns.

I have been running for about 2 years now, not a long time especially for someone my age.  I'm still a beginner at this. Maybe I just don't understand the runner mentality. Or maybe I am just being inundated by media and I need to tune it out. 

My late mother was a runner. She was healthy, fit, super conscious of her diet, her weight, and her appearance. Her vanity killed her in the end, at the age of 51. So from her I have learned that this cannot be about maintaining my appearance. In fact, running doesn't seem to be making me more attractive. I now have mild varicose veins thanks to running. I have lost weight, yes, but my distance running has caused my butt to go flat, like a pancake. I don't focus as much time on upper body work, so my arms are not as toned as they used to be. I spend my spare time running, not chiseling my features. Maybe that is wrong, but I have only so much time to spend on exercise and I have to be choosy. Would I rather have chiseled shoulders or would I rather spend time stretching to avoid injury? Stretching, thank you.

But I have learned some kind and good things from my mother the runner. Whenever she saw someone, anyone, running down the road, she felt an unrestrainable need to hoot and holler her congratulations to them.  She would honk her horn, smile and wave as she drove by them, probably scaring the poor person. She felt glee seeing someone else plodding away down the road. She knew something and was communing with them in some way that I did not understand back then. I wasn't a runner then. I just thought my mom was a nut case and I pleaded for her to stop making such a fuss while scaring the neighborhood runners. She waved me off.  I didn't understand and she knew I did't understand. She didn't judge me for that though. She just knew that she was a part of an unformed, diaphanous club that had a universal understanding. 

Running is hard. Running is fun. Running is meditative. Running makes you feel fantastic. Running makes you feel spent. Running is something in our human genetic composition that we do not understand. We no longer need to run to catch our food. But we cannot stop running. We're not heroes because we run. We're just running to get in touch with some nameless, ageless need to put one foot in front of the other, over and over again.     

Pre race Jitters

So this race is a little different from others that I have run for a couple of reasons. First, this is the longest race I've ever run. 13.1 miles. That's about 4.0 miles longer than the Gate River Run. Second, this race has a little more meaning to me than others. It's the Marine Corps Half Marathon in Jacksonville Florida.

My husband was a Marine.  He was a young machine gunner in 1992 when his career was drastically cut short due to injury. From 1992 until his death in 2011 he was a c4 quadriplegic, paralyzed from the chest down.

As you can tell, this race is a little different. And that is probably why I am awake at 3:30 in the morning when I should be snoozing. I just couldn't stay asleep. I almost never have dreams of my husband, but tonight I did. Were they wonderful romantic dreams recalling times of joy and fun? No, it was a dream in which my husband was being silly and trying to cross a huge, muddy ditch in his wheelchair. In my mind I knew he was going to get stuck in the mud, and I was going to have to pull him out. So I got mad.

I woke up angry. Angry because my husband was getting himself into trouble and expecting me to literally pull him out, and angry because I had wanted to have a dream that was sweet and reminiscent of our fun times. I'm wide awake now.

First Half Marathon

Yesterday morning at 7 a.m. I ran in the Marine Corps Half Marathon in Jacksonville, Florida. It was my first half marathon ever, and I had been training for about 16 weeks via a solid training plan I found on the internet. I feel like this plan really prepared me well because yesterday went as smooth as I ever could've expected. I was faster than I thought I would be, I had no nausea, and I even had an appetite after the run.

The weather was lovely at about 68 degrees with a light wind and just a few sprinkles here and there. I was dressed appropriately for the race but I quickly got cold after I stopped.  I had to get to my car to warm up. Thankfully, I always bring an extra outfit for my long runs because I know that I'll get soaking wet and disgusting. I didn't feel like I sweat all that much since it wasn't very hot outside. That probably helped my recovery.

I didn't really want to eat beforehand, but I knew I would need some calories so about an hour and a half before the run I had a Honey Stinger caffeine gel. It's about 100 calories, and it has 32 milligrams of caffeine. I had also had a cup of coffee about two and a half hours before the race started, but I did that so that things would get moving in the morning before I start running. There's nothing worse than having to stop at a portolet to take care of business. So I  deliberately got up early with the hopes that I could take care of things long before I ever arrived at the race. And it worked. Just something to keep in mind.

I didn't sleep very well the night before. Fortunately, I went to bed quite early for me at about 9 p.m. I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and could not get back to sleep. I had had a dream about Chris, and it was not a pleasant one. He was making me angry in my dream and I was getting mad and my anger eventually woke me up. There was no getting back to bed after that. I lounged around in the bed for about 30 minutes and then I decided it was just best to get up and get started.

The night before I had gotten just about everything I possibly could ready to go. I tried on different outfits, shoes hats, socks, compression socks, skorts, bandanas, etc. Eventually I narrowed it down and got to the most comfortable outfit I could find. I got my toe socks, my appropriate color coordinated bandana, my capris, my Nike tank top, and most importantly Chris' dog tags. I really did not want to run the race without those. Chris always said those were his good luck charm, although I've always wondered why he was in so many accidents while he was wearing those dog tags. But that's a story for another day. I take his dog tags with me when I travel to places like Alaska or Nova Scotia or whenever I feel like I need a boost of confidence and fortune. They kind of feel like worry beads to me. I hold on to them and just keep them in my hand, feeling the metal warmup. It's just a safety net I guess. In reality I don't really think that he is with me when I have those tags, but during yesterday's run I think I may have believed it. During those last few moments while I was at the end of the race I held the tags in my right hand up to the sky, and I felt like he was on my right hand side. It was like it was when we were in the van and he was pulled up in his wheelchair next to me. I would put my right hand on his left knee even though I knew he could not feel it. It gave me comfort. And so holding those dog tags in my right hand felt very similar to that. He was right there beside me. My pictures from the race are going to look a little funny with me holding metal dog tags and practically talking to them.

From mile one to mile 10 I felt great. It seemed like all of my body parts were working together in unison without pain. Actually, at mile 6 I noticed my knees were a little tired. Then I didn't really notice any pain until mile 10. By the time I hit mile 11 I really wasn't feeling much of anything anymore. So I just started to speed up. For most of the race, my speed was 10 minutes 45 seconds. But on mile 12 it was 10 minutes 15 seconds and on mile 13 it was 9 minutes 40 seconds! That was crazy! I guess I just wanted to finish strong.

I went quite a bit faster than I ever expected. Honestly, I thought I was going to average a 12 minute mile and yet I never went over an 11 minute mile. It's strange how whenever you run in a race you almost can't help but run faster than you want to. I had put myself at the back of the pack where all the 12-minute milers were supposed to be. I was hoping that that would keep me from running too fast. I think it did work. It kept me from hurting myself. If I had run a 9 minute 40 second mile in the beginning I really would've been hurting around mile five or six and that would have been awful.