In touch with my inner runner

June 24, 2004

Dear David,

There must be a time-release gene that kicks in during middle age to make otherwise reasonable people do unreasonable things.

Some people leave the work-a-day grind in a cubicle behind to become a masseuse. Others buy a boat and set off to save souls on the subcontinent.

I am doing nothing so extreme, and yet it is the last thing I ever expected to do. I am bent on becoming a runner.

Wow, you say, that's really throwing the dice, really going for it. In a small way, it is.

Some people think they were born to lose. I think I was born slow-footed. No blue ribbons from Play Day races are pressed into my mother's memory book. In elementary school, boys who could run fast, like Eddie Shirrell, awed me. In my 10-year-old world view, running fast was better than being tough.

How do they do that? I wondered, not understanding yet that they didn't know either. They just could.

When I played baseball, no coach ever gave me the steal sign. "You look like you're running in molasses," my old coach, Casey, said.

Becoming a runner is a bit different from the usual mid-life decision to climb Mount Everest or learn to fly. It is something I've always wanted to do primarily because it's something I've never been able to do.

I want to have the experience of gliding over the pavement. So far, each step feels like the coming of Tyrannosaurus Rex in "Jurassic Park." Bdoom ... Bdoom ... Bdoom.

Thankfully, Dr. George Sheehan, author of "Running to Win," claims runners are made, not born.

Sheehan also thinks the act of running releases the mind to play and is good for the soul. He says: "Sweat cleanses from the inside. It comes from places a shower will never reach."

I like the solitude, running the streets downtown these sapphire early summer mornings, waving to the artists painting new murals on our floodwall and jogging alongside the barge traffic on the Mississippi. Much is to be said for being on the ground instead of experiencing the world through the windshield of a car.

My goal is not to become a racer or marathon runner. It is to become fit.

We believe in the survival of the fittest, and yet relatively few of us are really fit. I'm not and never have been. I would like to know how it feels.

"Everyone is an athlete," Sheehan says. "The only difference is that some of us are in training, and some are not." For most of my life, I've been not.

My first step was to buy good running shoes and to read running magazines that left me wondering whether I'm a heel striker or a pronator. DC laughs at such seriousness. Just run, she says.

My yoga teacher, Amy, runs, too. She gave me a 10-week plan that's supposed to leave me capable of running for half an hour without stopping. Here at Week Three, half an hour might as well be a marathon to me.

My body, and particularly my legs, resist every time I start, begging me to stop. I remind myself that I am doing this to be good to myself, to become fit. When I remember why I'm running I stop resisting, and running becomes easier.

The why is much more powerful than the why nots.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.