My Road Back to Running

The title of my blog is "Fast Fancy Walking," but I didn't start out a walker. It's been a long strange trip full of frustration and injury. I realized I haven't talked about it much on the blog so here goes, for all who might be interested.

In 2005, I was out of college and looking for a challenge. All the way through my formal education I'd been able to take comfort in knowing that I was smart enough to get good grades without having to work too hard at it, but since graduating I was somewhat adrift. What was I if I wasn't a good student? Or, being several years after my lessons ended, a good musician? It occurred to me that I'd only ever pursued things that I was naturally good at. Why not pick something I am naturally terrible at, and see if I can make myself good? All athletic pursuits certainly qualified, as I had absolutely ZERO natural athletic ability. But I settled on running, which appealed to me because 1) it was quantifiable and 2) I truly, epically SUCKED at it. When I started out, I literally could not run 1/10th of a mile without horrible shin pain and sucking wind like a Hoover.

While trying the Jeff Galloway run/walk technique eventually helped me increase some distance, I still got shin splints every single time I ran. For years. Finally in 2007 I saw a podiatrist and was told my feet were hyperflexible, in the 99th percentile for flexibility in fact, and that in this case flexibility was a very bad thing. My tendons and ligaments flopped around in my feet completely untethered, and this lack of stability was putting massive strain on my calves, which in turn put massive strain on my shins. The orthotics only did so much. Although I kept trying to do run intervals in my workouts, I realized if I trained I could actually walk faster than the glacial pace I would need to keep my shins from hurting. So I gave up on running completely by around 2009 and pursued walking exclusively. I also changed the way I slept - as a stomach sleeper, I had my toes pointed all night, which was making my calves less flexible.

In 2012 I decided to attempt a full marathon PR, because I was sick of not having PR'd at that distance since my very first full marathon in 2009. I trained for 6 months and got fast. I could walk 10 miles in under 2 hours. Sure enough this led to a PR marathon (by 46 minutes!) in the fall. After several more years of ups and downs with my fitness, I did the Spartan Sprint Lambeau Field in June 2017 (recap is in the archives!) and found new joy with fitness. Obstacle racing let me view my body like a farm: there's always something to work on, something to fix, something to improve. The training wouldn't be boring and I could constantly incorporate new things. This was so patently different from the slogs through miles and miles that I'd done before. Instead of the amazing diversity of "four 5-mile workouts, a 10-mile workout, and a long walk," I could do 3 strength workouts, a few yoga sessions, elliptical, bike, jogging, monkey bars, obstacle-specific training, etc. One thing I noticed, though: nobody in OCR walks. Walking is anathema to many OCR participants (which is, frankly, an obnoxious attitude to take, but there it is). In order to really pursue this sport and feel like I'd earned any respect at all, I felt some pressure to start running.

Thankfully, in the other activities I'd taken up (hot yoga, elliptical, etc) I had been building my body to be able to handle the stress of running for months, so when I finally added it in I was able to do so fairly quickly and safely. The shins still bother me when I run on concrete, but most OCRs are trail races anyway, so I try to do trails when I can, and I can actually do it. The dirt absorbs the most damaging impact, and icing afterward helps prevent the pain from returning. Yesterday I ran continuously for a full two hours, about 11 miles, on dirt trails - something I never dreamed I could do without shin pain back in 2005.

My road back to running, it turns out, wasn't a road at all, but a trail. And a series of obstacle races that I felt compelled to try, just because I sucked at it and that pissed me off. Don't let sucking at something stop you from doing it. Hard work more than makes up for a lack of talent. You can make yourself into a person that other people would be shocked to hear is NOT a "natural athlete."