Flashes of Panic

While I’m on the subject, because I know these vignettes and asides do a poor job of carrying a narrative (a novel this ain’t): Yes, I ran this morning. Thirty-one minutes, no walking. Sunday, I ran thirty-six with my father, at something like 9:40 pace.

I could run a lot faster, but my sense is that patience is more important than anything else right now. My legs feel (relatively) strong, and I finish the runs feeling like I could go longer, but that’s not the point; muscle is the most incredibly shapeable thing about our bodies. We can do anything with the “pieces of rubber” that drive us forward, or the elastic pump in our ribs; they are there for the changing.

The catch is the frame, the sticks and baling wire and duct tape that those ever-strengthening muscles are pulling around. We can strengthen that (bones thicken in response to load,) but it’s so much slower than the muscle and the blood. It’s trivially easy to make oneself fit enough to do damage; ask any new runner who enthusiastically trains into tendonitis or a stress fracture.

Whatever my problem is, it’s there in the frame. So I have to be ever so careful about this build-up. Every so often someone asks if I’m “running again yet,” and I’m not quite sure how to answer. Yeah, I’m running again, but I’m not really training; I’m carefully performing a thorough set of trials on the current state of my foot. Half-hour runs with no walking was one of my milestones, and I’ll settle here for a week or two; the next milestone is consecutive-day runs.

So what’s the end state? I don’t really think I’ll know. It’s one thing to be out shuffling around for the sake of being outside and moving; it’s quite another to be running carelessly. I’m a long way from that long middle-distance stride I used to have.

Now Playing: Good Advices from Fables Of The Reconstruction by R.E.M.