Mar 20 2012
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The tortoise was merely convinced

Staying on track

  A surprisingly welcome space for an endomorphic runner is your local high-school track.

As an adult-onset athlete, I never set foot on one until I was in my 30s.  But I lived for a while near Scarsdale, N.Y.,  and my running route there took me first past the office of the doctor who concocted the Scarsdale Medical Diet (not that it did me any good) and then past Scarsdale High School, where amazingly, I saw people that looked like me walking and jogging around the track.

It had never occurred to me that they’d be open to the public.  But many are.  I’ve lived in seven different cities, and in each, the local track was open to the community after school hours.  (That’s assuming a school team isn’t practicing, but sometimes, even when they are. I’ve seen people walking around a track while a football game was in progress in the infield.)

You might think an outside track would attract the skinny, haughty runners I call Shirtless Wonders, but there’s usually an amazingly diverse group of body types running and walking the oval.  The advantages are many: a soft, springy surface, no cars to run you over, no potholes or rocks. You can set a water bottle down on the side of the track and take a drink periodically, and not have to lug it with you. If you have children, they can walk on the track, read on the bleachers or kick a ball in the infield; no need for a babysitter while you work out.

The only downside is that if you run on a track too much, you can develop bursitis, like I once did,  or suffer some other vague soreness from repetitive motion.  To counter that, if it’s not against the track rules, reverse your direction every couple of laps.  I like to start in the outside lane and then change lanes on every lap, working my way to the center, and then, when I’ve run all the lanes, reverse direction.  (Not a good idea, of course, if the track is crowded, but if you’re only one of a few, it’s also a good way of keeping up with how many laps you’ve run.)

A standard track, by the way, is four laps of the innermost lane to the mile.

Another reason for endie runners to love tracks is that they give us a chance to show off.

You heard that right.

No, no one will be impressed by our speed.  But when you’ve been doing this as long as I have, and you can run for freakin’ forever, you will enjoy running lap after lap while watching the faster, skinnier runners who’ve been lapping you, pack up their stuff and leave, casting furtive, incredulous glances at you, still proudly trotting around. I am convinced that, given enough time on a track, I could outrun even Gabriel Sherman.

Yes, I know, pride is a sin. But it’s heady stuff, I tell you.

The hare, after all, was full of passion.  The tortoise was merely convinced.

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Mar 17 2012
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Only rats should run in circles

Track, trail or road? All three, to stay healthy

To keep your knees functioning, keep moving. But there’s another way for heavy runners to stay healthy, and that’s to forever be changing your terrain.

The New York Times says here that trails aren’t better than asphalt. And if you avail yourself of a high-school track, that soft, springy surface that feels so good on your feet can cause all sorts of pain elsewhere if you run on the oval long enough.

Many physical ailments, from runner’s knee to carpal tunnel, are caused by repetitive stress. So don’t keep repeating the same route.  Just like coaches advise you to mix it up in speed – running fast some days, slow others –  a frequently changed running surface helps to keep an endie runner’s legs healthy.

This morning, for example, I covered 5.9 miles at an average 10:44 pace (but who’s counting?) according to my trusty Nike+. Part of the distance was on a road; part was on trails, some flat, some hilly.  And I alternated not only my surface and pace, but the ways in which I moved.  Twice, when the path was clear and unobstructed, I jogged backwards for a minute, to give a different set of muscles some action. I also zig-zagged around a series of trees, and trotted slowly – arms extended for balance – down a low, narrow wall of stone.

If anyone observed all this, would they think me a lunatic?  Of course.  But as the Japanese say, you’ll be thought a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well go ahead and dance.  Or run zig-zag around a long line of trees.

The end result of my lunacy is strong, healthy legs. Those who think I’m crazy can laugh all the way to their doctors.

Me, I’ll just keep running, injury-free.

 

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Mar 14 2012
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Don't want to run? Don't blame your knees

On bended knees

When people ask what I think about while I’m running for an hour or more, I tell them I’m dreaming of knee-replacement surgery.

To be clear:  That’s a joke.

But people sometimes take me seriously and send information on recovery times and surgeons they recommend.  I accept it all gratefully, because you never know.  My legs feel strong now, but as far as I know, the cartilage could be eroding like the sand dunes at Folly Beach.

For now, though, the only time my knees give me trouble is when I don’t run. If I take a week off, like I just did, I start feeling little twinges and aches. Soon as I get running again, I feel like the Tin Man newly oiled:  Everything moves fluidly again.

My experience goes against the old notion that running is bad for the overweight because the repetitive pounding puts too much stress on our already overtaxed joints.  Slow down, take it easy, just walk, the naysayers say, or you’ll wind up with Runner’s Knee or worse.

For the record, Runner’s Knee is not specific to runners and is generally caused by overuse.  Unless you’re running  40 miles a week, do not panic. (If you are, congratulations and please pass the Advil.)

I’ve been running for more than 20 years, at weights ranging from 25 to 75 pounds over what Weight Watchers says is my ideal weight.  I have suffered my share of ailments: a painful bout of bursitis in my hip that required cortisone shots; occasional soreness of foot; sporadic howls of indignation from my left knee.

But usually when something is wrong, it’s because of ill-fitting or worn-out shoes.   I buy new shoes; the pain goes away. Running is not expensive, not compared to, say, skiing or horseback riding. But you do have to keep yourself in shoes.  I find I need to replace mine every 250 to 300 miles.

I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV.  As my hero George Sheehan said, I’m an experiment of one. I’ve also been running a long time, supporting a lot of weight. These legs are not so beautiful, but they’re stronger than the average bear’s.

Meanwhile, the prevailing wisdom, which often isn’t so wise, has finally caught up to my own personal experience.  Here’s a link to an NPR report on why running isn’t bad for your knees. In fact, it may strengthen your cartilage. So, if you’re blaming your knees on why you don’t run, it’s time to invent another excuse.   And just so you know:  There is no walker’s high.

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Jan 12 2012
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All set for a water landing

Our bodies, ourselves

   

    Hippocrates took a stab at it, but it was the late American psychologist W.H. Sheldon who,  2,400 years later, created the business of somatotyping, categorizing humans by their body types.

    If you must read Sheldon (I don’t recommend it), do NOT get his “Atlas of Men,” which contains a thousand photographs of largely unattractive naked men and is the closest thing to pornography available at your public library.

    My librarian is still giving me strange looks.

    Better is Sheldon’s “The Varieties of Temperament,” which abandons pictures for text, and explains more than you’ll ever want to know about the physique-driven characteristics of humans.

    My hero George Sheehan was an ectomorph, characterized by “fragility, linearity, flatness of the chest and delicacy throughout the body.”

    Us endomorphs?

   We have “low specific gravity” and “float high in the water.”

    Uh, thanks.

    It’s a little hard not to feel slighted.  Given a choice (which I wasn’t), I’d rather have delicate limbs than the dubious talent of easily remaining afloat.

    But if I’m ever shipwrecked, I’m covered.

     And for the record, your new year’s resolutions will do nothing to alter your basic shape, no matter how dedicated you are. 

      Writes Sheldon, “Endomorphs are usually fat, but they are sometimes seen emaciated.  In the latter event, they do not change into mesomorphs or ectomorphs any more than a starved mastiff will change into a spaniel or a collie.”

       I learned this long ago, since I’ve run nearly a zillion miles over the past 20 years with no significant change in my shape.

     The changes, they’re all in my head.

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Dec 20 2011
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Happy trails

If an endomorph runs in the woods, does her bottom still look fat?

                                                          

     There are two good reasons endomorphs should run in the woods.  Neither is a body part.

     First, as I write in this month’s edition of Inside Dirt, the monthly newsletter of Trail Runner magazine, you can rest without anyone noticing. And second, the forgiving surfaces of most trails are good for our knees.

    And then there’s a third reason that does involve a body part. In the woods, no one is scrutinizing my rear.

     You can click here, or read it below:

     The problem with being a fat runner is this:  Everyone wants to give you a ride.

     No one’s ever around when you’re driving on a back road and run out of gas.  But try heading out for an easy three-miler after dinner when you’re my size, and suddenly there’s a Good Samaritan behind every shrub.

    When a car slows down, I know what is coming.  A silvery head will poke out, and a worried voice will call, “You okay, honey? You need a ride?”

     Another day, another PR frustrated.  I have to slow down – maybe even stop, depending on the degree of skepticism — to explain that I am, in fact, exercising; thank you kindly, now please go away.

     It’s an indignity the skinny runners never suffer.  The ectomorphs look like runners.  I, endomorph, don’t.

     When I first started running 20 years ago, I was a size 16-18, so I couldn’t fault the nice people who offered me roadside assistance.  Of course they thought my car had broken down somewhere out of sight, or that I was being chased by an invisible assailant.  That was more plausible that the truth, which was that a small human blimp like me could run three miles without stopping.

    Over time, I lost a little weight and a couple of dress sizes, which helped deter the random acts of kindness.  But what helped the most was getting my oversized load off the road and onto the trail.

     I first discovered the raptures of trail running six years ago when I moved to a town infested with horses.  Hopkinton, MA.,  is a perfectly respectable location for road running; in fact, a little race called the Boston Marathon starts here.  But there is also a fine network of equestrian trails that begin across the street from my house, and one hot day, looking for shade, I gingerly picked my way through them.

       It was all so enchanting.   Canopied by hardwoods, I found cooler air and a cornucopia of sights:  white birch trees in a cluster, clear streams framed by boulders, a mother turkey and her chicks, a waving gauntlet of tall, emerald ferns.  At any moment, I thought, Snow White, encircled by bluebirds, would skip by me in the woods.

        A few days later, I went exploring again, and, because it’s my default speed outdoors, I broke out in a jog.  A few weeks later, I was regularly running the trails.

    Well, okay, maybe “running” is a stretch.   In truth, my movement is more of an enthusiastic jog.  I monitor my footing closely, watching out for roots, rocks and manure.  But like Emerson, I have found “a perfect exhilaration” in the woods.   Trails, it turns out, are the ideal track for heavy runners like me.

    There are two reasons for this.  First, we can – and must – adjust our speed to the terrain. This is a blessing. We can catch our breath, without embarrassment or notice, if the trail demands that we slow.

    Second, and most importantly, out there, no one is ever looking with derision at your rear.

     True, nature demands compensation for running her rarefied paths.  Who knew, for example, just how fat a tick can grow when embedded on a generous hip for a day?

      But for endomorph runners like me, mud, poison ivy and an occasional bout of Lyme disease are an acceptable trade-off for the beauty of the trail and its rugged, yielding surface, an unobtrusive kindness for geriatric knees.  These things, coupled with the built-in privacy, ensure that at least half of my weekly miles are now run on trails.

      Of course, I’m not completely alone out there.  

    They’re not my personal trails, and I do have company on occasion.  But so far, no one has offered me a ride, and next to a 1,200 pound Quarter horse,  my own rump looks positively  svelte.

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Dec 16 2011
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Mesomorphs We Love

Pre and me

Pop quiz:  Name the top American distance runners who are endomorphs.

Anyone?  Bueller?  Bueller?

    You can’t name them, because there aren’t any.  People of my body type don’t tend to be fast. This is why there’s the Clydesdale and Filly Racing Federation, to award prizes in road races to heavier runners, who may not be as fast as the ectomorphs, but put in equal, if not superior, effort.

    For a while, I thought Steve Prefontaine had been an endie, but after reading Dr. William Sheldon’s The Varieties of Temperament, the1942 book that classified humans into body types, I decided that Prefontaine was a mesomorph:  strong, compact and muscular.

    I fell in love with Pre when I watched this video of him winning the LA Times Classic in 1973. It wasn’t so much his running form that hooked me, but the interview at 4:50 on the clip.  Here was this world-class Olympian, patiently sitting for what was, to be honest, an extremely boring interview when he would probably have rather been in the shower, and he was funny, kind and self-effacing.  This is not the Steve Prefontaine that blew away competitors on the track, but the Pre that lived humbly in a trailer, grew his own salad greens and quietly visited prisons to coach inmates in his “spare” time.

    That’s the Pre I love.   And why I’m neither Team Jacob nor Team Edward, but forevermore, devotedly, Team Pre.

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Dec 13 2011
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Not our tribe. But funny.

Attack of the skinny people

Um, no.     You won’t find me here.     But I do like the guy with the “Fastest Kid at Fat Camp” sign plastered to his chest.

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Dec 10 2011
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The Pushmi-Pullyu of running

Legs versus Lungs

     One reason divorce is so horrible for children is that, in the split, they lose the irreplaceable power of the parental Pushmi-Pullyu.

     Remember the creature from Hugh Lofting’s “Doctor Doolittle”?  It is the beast with a head on each end, and so it is always awake, and when one end is weary, the other can rest.

     In running, the vital Pushmi-Pullyu unit is comprised of our legs and our lungs.

     Usually, when I’m having a tough run, trouble with one or the other is to blame.  If I’ve exercised too much lately, my legs feel dead and heavy; if I’m stressed and anxious, generally tired or feel a cold coming on, my breathing will seem off track.

     On those days, the way to get through a run is to let the strong partner take over.

     This morning, for example, I was plagued by a small sinus infection that’s kept me from feeling 100 percent for a couple of days.   It had been three days since I’d run, however, and it was starting to show in my temperament, so my kids shooed me out the door.

     Predictably,  my breathing was not as deep or steady as I’d like, so I quit worrying about my oxygen intake and let my legs do all the work.  By pushing them to their limit, I was able to ignore what was going on above my neck, and I wound up with a 10:31 pace for just under 4 miles; not fast by anyone’s standards, but for me, not too shabby.  (Don’t take my word for it; you can find me on Nike Plus under the user name Endie Runner.)

     Incidentally, the generally accepted rule of thumb for whether to run when you’re sick is this:  If your ailment is below the neck (bronchial infection, stomach ailments and the like), stay home;   if it’s above the neck, go forth and run wild.

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Dec 06 2011
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Motivation to leave the back of the pack

The coming zombie apocalypse

     Remember when Adrian asks Rocky, “Why do you wanna fight?” and he replies, “Because I can’t sing or dance”?

     That’s why I run.

     Running, for me, is dance, and the stretching I do afterwards, the closest I will ever come to ballet. Trust me, you don’t want to see me dance.  Just ask my kids. They cringe whenever they come across me shimmying and gyrating across the kitchen, so I’ve learned to keep it in check.  I’ve taken dance lessons twice and retained about as much as I did of my high-school Latin, which is to say, not much.

     The road is my dance.  So I loved this post  from a fellow blogger about arm dancing on the run.  This underscores the point I made at the end of the Newsweek essay:  A few miles into a good run, and you stop caring what anyone thinks.

     I have no doubt that the motorists who pass me at the end of a long run think I have wandered away from an asylum.  Sometimes I am singing to myself, or whistling (a GREAT addition to a workout, by the way; it really helps to regulate your breathing.)  I have also been known to make the sign of the cross, lift a hand in praise, or stop to pick a flower and tuck it over my ear.  Last week, I ran the last of four miles carrying a 5-pound log I picked up in the woods.  If it’s hot, and I’m overcome by endorphins, sometimes I remove more articles of clothing than is appropriate for a woman my size.

      But I’m usually so lost in the moment that what I’m doing doesn’t register right away.  Bottom line:  If I can blush about it later, I know it was a REALLY great workout.

     Laugh at me all you want, but when the zombie apocalypse comes, I’ll be able to outrun them on my not-so-beautiful, but phenomenally strong legs.

    Which brings us to what may be the most fun run of the coming new year: The Run for Your Life,  “part 5K, part obstacle course, part escaping the clutches of zombies.”  It’s a guaranteed personal best!

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Dec 02 2011
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Just sayin'

“Returning from my daily run the other morning, I came upon my neighbor, out in his slippers collecting the morning paper. He looked at me in my running gear and asked, ‘Doesn’t running hurt?’  I thought about his question. ‘It does if you’re doing it right,’ I said.”  

   — Dean Karnazes, ultramarathoner in “Run! 26.2 Stories of Blisters and Bliss”

These days, I’m thinking that’s true of everything.   If you’re not working, loving, parenting, praying – heck, raking enough that it hurts,  you’re probably not performing at your best.

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