Burning off the day’s defeats

Lessons learned from running for 40 years

Every year when the Tamarack Ottawa Race Weekend comes around, I think back to the halfmarathon I ran in 1981. The race was sponsored by the Toronto Star, where I was working on the Sunday paper. The course, with some not-so-gently rising hills, was laid out at the Toronto Zoo.

My time wasn’t bad for a lad in his early 30s: 21.1 km in one hour and 29 minutes. This suggests I might have been able to run a marathon in three-and-a-half hours or so. (The second half always takes longer, for a runner of my calibre, at least.)

But I knew better. For the last few kilometres, it was only willpower that kept me going. When I crossed the finish line, I’d already accepted that whatever else I might be, I was no marathoner.

What I remember most is the disappointingly small number of people who were actually interested in hearing about my stats or the mission-accomplished feeling I gained by finishing the race.

When I started training for the half-marathon, I was warned it would be hard on the joints. My knees were fine, as it turned out. But my sudden absence must have been hard on the joints I used to hang out in after work with my reporter buddies.

I kept running when I joined the Star’s parliamentary bureau in Ottawa. Toronto’s weather can be bleak and damp in winter, but I learned nothing compares to Ottawa’s biting cold in January.

I liked to run after work, to burn off the day’s defeats and frustrations. It was so cold at times that my Walkman, tucked under five layers of thick cotton and Gore-Tex, began to seize up. Elvis was singing so slowwwly, dragging the tempo, that I had to turn off the tape. That meant I didn’t have Burning Love and his other uptempo tunes to warm me up.

The thing I most admire about long-distance runners is their ability to absorb pain. A friend who ran a marathon in Hawaii told me that when he took off his running shoes after the race, he saw that blood and fluid from broken blisters had cemented his socks to his feet. It was so painful, he went on, that he had to soak his feet in the bathtub to peel off the bloody socks. But blisters are nothing. Last month, Krista duchene, a mother of three from Brantford, finished the Canadian Half-Marathon in Montreal with a broken leg.

Such courage and determination may be why some people resent runners. When Jim Fixx, only 52, died of a heart attack, a cynic on the night copy desk left a smirking note in my newsroom mailbox.

In 1977, Fixx wrote The Complete Book of Running, which sold a million copies.

An autopsy showed Fixx had an enlarged heart and was genetically predisposed to heart disease. If he hadn’t taken up running, it’s unlikely he would have outlived his father who died at 42 of a heart attack.

I’ve been a fitness runner for 41 years, and this year I intended to join the 12,500 who run in Ottawa’s 10K race. While training, I had a setback. Every time I ran for an hour or more my feet would swell.

“Maybe you’re pregnant,” my wife suggested. Nope, not pregnant, but our family doc told me to stop running for now.

I’ll be 65 in time for next year’s Race Weekend. That’s a significant number, placing me on the outer ring of old age. To greet my geezerhood, I’m thinking of running a half-marathon again.