I’ve started training for another marathon. That is, if you can call it training.
My dad ran something like 20 marathons in his 20-year running career. He ran all the big marathons, like New York and Boston, but he also loved those little New England races in Maine and Connecticut, hosted by small towns that would serve the runners a spaghetti dinner in the town chapel the night before the race.
His personal best was a 2:58 finish in Boston, the sub-three-hour time he had strived for. Dad was a little, shall we say, fanatical about his training. He would go on these crazy diets while my mom watched his once husky frame shrink into what she called a “bag of bones.”
One year after the Boston Marathon, he passed out in the bathroom of his hotel room and bashed his face on the corner of the sink so he looked like a Jewish Rocky Balboa. Mom put the kibosh on his obsession after that. “One marathon a year,” she told him. “That’s it.”
I started running when I was in college at CU, where the endless expanse of trails allowed for plenty of opportunity for exploration. I loved making my way up the shaded trail that ran up Boulder Canyon, through parks and over bridges and under tunnels, up to where the pavement turns to soft dirt and gravel and the rock walls tower over the river. I gradually pushed my distance, looking forward to exploring around the next bend as I progressed. Eventually, I was doing 10-mile loops all the way over to Sunshine Canyon, loving the endorphin buzz and mindlessness that seemed to come only from running two hours or more.
Whenever I went home to Connecticut for a visit, my dad and I would go for long runs in the McLean Game Refuge in Simsbury, a seemingly endless expanse of undeveloped forests where a thick carpet of fallen pine needles provided an optimal running surface. Blue rings painted around the thick tree trunks demarcated the trails that meandered for miles through deep forests, passing through an occasional meadow or past a muddy pond.
He would always coax me into routes that were much longer than I was prepared for. “Come on, kid, we’ll just go out for a half-hour,” he would say. “We’ll take it easy.”
Taking it easy meant he would start us out at a pace I could manage and then gradually increase it so I wouldn’t notice until my heart was in my throat, or my legs turned to rubber. He always wore one of those fancy digital runners watches, but I never took interest in the precise measurement of anything, never mind how fast I put one foot in front of the other. So I’d let him take the helm, which inevitably meant I got a lot more than I signed up for.
I remember on one particularly grueling route, we finally arrived at the trailhead. I assumed it was the end, but it turned out to be a halfway point. “OK, kiddo, let’s turn around!” my dad said with grating enthusiasm.
I’d come home and promptly eat more than twice the calories I burned, and then pass out on the couch for the rest of the day.
“What did you do to our daughter?” my mom would always say. I always found that somewhat humiliating, especially when he started to approach his 60s. I would simply never catch up with him.
I never had any interest in times or races, but did learn to love the simple joys of running. The two-shoes-go-anywhere sport has suited me well in my travels as a journalist, but it has also been the mainstay of my fitness living in the mountains, kept me at a higher performance level for when the time came to start hiking Highlands Bowl in the winter or mountain biking on the Government Trail in the summer.
I still don’t wear a watch when I run, nor do I really care about how fast I’m going. I’ll casually glance at the clock when coming and going, figuring an hour to and hour and a half outside is really all I’m after, no matter what the distance or the pace. My idea of training is just getting out there and doing it, gradually increasing the distance (or time?) of my once-a-week long runs.
Chances are I won’t end up running the marathon, but at least I’ll end up running. I figure the only thing I really need to know is when it’s time for me to go for a run.
Freelance columnist Alison Berkley can be reached at alison@berkleymedia.com.
