Rediscovering Running in a Pandemic

I know, I know, this is a cycling blog. If you wanted to read about running, you’d be… somewhere else. Having pioneered the running blog concept in 2003, trust me, I get it. And yet there’s been something about running lately that’s just exactly what I needed. It’s just easy. A bit of an escape, maybe, when we’re not leaving home much. It helps me process the world around me. And maybe you get it too? I know there is now a TBD Slack Running channel that stays pretty busy. So it can’t just be me.

What is it about running? It’s been with me almost forever. My mom tells a story about me when I was maybe 3 years old - we were walking in our neighborhood to Wendy’s or somewhere and instead of being a normal kid I would run down every block, stopping to wait for her when we had to cross the street. I didn’t really do any sports between then and my sophomore year of high school when, after being summarily rejected from the softball team because I had no idea how to play softball, I decided to take up running. I remember the first time I was able to run two miles without stopping. It was like a miracle. I was incredibly slow, but I did it.

At this time my dad was in the middle of an extremely contentious second divorce. Running became an escape because being at my house was no Sunday picnic. Encouraged by my new best friend Kim, who was a pretty fast sprinter, I decided to join the track team because they let everyone on and couldn’t cut me. I was frankly quite bad. There wasn’t much difference between my 100 meter and 800 meter pace. But nobody seemed to care that much! And it was fun and we got these cute uniforms. I kept running and by my senior year I got on the podium for a few cross country races. What I realized was that while I didn’t have leg speed, I didn’t slow down that much as the races got longer.

Oy, those shorts!

When I went away to college at Bowdoin, a small Liberal Arts school in Maine, I kept running. Because I went to a Division III school, pretty much anyone could join the cross country and track teams. I never made the Top 7, but I did get to travel all over New England for meets. I also loved that the maximum distances were even longer - my best college race ever was probably a 10,000 Meter race on the track. Mind numbingly boring but my friends Alison, Laurie and I just ran around together in circles and finished in just under 41 minutes, a lifetime PR I would spend years in my 20’s trying to best.

From the high desert to the snow of Southern Maine…

Running through college gave me something else to do in Maine when it was cold and dark all winter. It was always an escape, or a time when I could think about an essay I had to write, or a problem I had with a boyfriend. Once a year, we would do an epic 18 mile run to LL Bean’s in Freeport and back. Our coach was kind of nuts - one year he blindfolded us, put us in a van, dropped us off around 8 miles from campus, and told us good luck getting back. Another year we went to a field outside of Brunswick and we shot shotguns at targets before running back to campus. But it was kind of great, and I’ll never forget it.

After I graduated I was a bit aimless. I came back home to Denver and almost immediately after graduating my family and I raced together at the Bolder Boulder. Running was just always there.

After college, running kind of lots its structure, I suppose. I joined a group in Boulder and ran a few marathons. But marathons are awful, and I reached a point when I realized I was never going to be a great runner. I got into triathlons for several years mostly because as it turned out I was good at them, and they helped me escape my own divorce. When I moved to New York in 2011, I realized that if I was going to work New York hours and try to have a social life it would be better just to focus on bikes. I’ll never regret that, it gave me the chance to meet all my amazing teammates and explore the mid-Atlantic racing bikes.

For some reason, though, now that I’m back home in Denver, and there’s no bike racing to be done really, running is back in my life. The TBD Run Club decided to run a 5k time trial and I said hey, why not run a 5k as fast as I can on no training? That seems smart. I did it, and there was something about it that just made sense. I wasn’t worried about getting COVID, or the upcoming election, or anything. I was just running, and occasionally looking down at my watch to see how fast I was going. I finished that 5k in just under 23 minutes - pretty slow compared to my college days, but not bad for a 42 year old lady who just started running again. Since then I started a program called Run with Hal (Hal is Hal Higdon, a guy who’s been coaching runners probably since before I was born), and this week I ended up running 22 miles. Sometimes I take my dog with me and we run 12 minute miles. Sometimes I go to a local track and run 400 meter intervals. But Hal doesn’t care!

Thanksgiving was pretty…. anti-climactic this year, what with the almost stay at home order we have in Denver. Rod and I went to Wash Park with a few friends and some Tracksmith ‘Turkey Trot’ bibs I got with an order and tried to run two loops as fast as we could. It was a little sloppy due to a snowstorm earlier in the week but for once I crushed Rod, running 7:35 pace for 5 miles. Tracksmith had sent me a few finisher ribbons as well. I felt like I had won a real race! Or at least enough of a race to justify a very large slice of apple pie later in the day.

I’m still riding my bike here and there, when it seems fun. But running always seems like fun. I’m sure I’ll race my bike again, hopefully even next year. But for now, I’m just running. And it’s wonderful.