When things get bad, we run.
Four times in modern history, humanity has seen a massive surge in the popularity of distance running – a trend that follows the rise and fall of global crisis.
The first boom came during the 1930s, during the Great Depression, with the Great American Footrace. Just a few years after the end of World War II, a medical student named Roger Bannister re-lit the flame of athletic progress by running the world’s first sub-4-minute mile. In the 1970s, running flourished once again. Balm to a country of floundering identity, struggling to recover from the grief of Vietnam, the anxiety of the Cold War, a felonious president, and the state-sponsored murder of Civil Rights leaders.
One year after September 11th, what was the most popular sport in America? Trail Running.
And now, two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, I am doing something I once thought impossible. Several friends – themselves relatively new to the sport – have roped me into training for the 2023 New York City Marathon.
Maybe it’s a coincidence. Or maybe there’s something more to it. It’s as if the abundant danger and pervasive anxiety of our present moment flip the Fight-or-Flight switch, activating our primary, ultimate survival skill. Absent of an adversary to fight, what else can we do but dash headlong into the forest? It is as much our instinct as sex. And in both cases, we’re hard-wired for it.
I am by no means a great runner. Hell, I’m not even good. I gas out around 10 miles, and my quickest pace is 9:30. At 6’1” and 210 lbs, Nature designed me for sprints with long rests between. To lift weights, menace quarterbacks, and toss people out of bars. “Not this,” my knees soberly remind me, after every long run.
After all, I only started in March 2020. A decision borne of pure mania; I’d lost my job, I’d been trapped inside for a month, and I was climbing up the walls – feeling more and more like a forgotten zoo exhibit with every passing day. Those first runs were not exercise. They were desperate bids at freedom, attempting escape down the empty streets of Queens.
A year went by, and runners cautiously returned to the roads. But unlike in my adolescence, I began to notice it was me passing them, this time. It all clicked into place. Somehow, I’d come to crave, enjoy, and even achieve a degree of mastery over this thing I loathed – finding freedom in the form of punishment I dreaded most.
Regardless: I can’t help but notice a silver lining around this beer belly and thoroughly-average pace. Most people who run can’t relate to the advice of elite athletes. Who among us can withstand an hour of philosophizing about heelstrike and stride length? Those bodies and minds are fundamentally, spectacularly different than the 99%. They’ve spent years on form, alone – shaping their bodies to conform with the most-efficient techniques. For the rest of us: it’s quite the other way around. We begin by simply… beginning! By setting out on our first run with terrible form, no athleticism, no cadence, and no endurance. And if we stick with it, our bodies gradually discover and adapt to a comfortable way to run. A natural form, as opposed to a constructed one.
So in this series, that’s what I’ll try to offer — a natural form. Guidance from a dedicated amateur’s perspective, developed over a decade of false starts, half-finished programs, injuries, lapses, and outright failures. You might learn something; you might not. But if anything, I hope you’ll learn you aren’t alone.
