The Long Run

I have realized that I need the long run to feel like myself: all those years of running marathons have left their mark on me. For the longest time, I refused to let grad school get in the way of marathons, but I always had a guilty conscience that in the time I’d spent running I could have written some really great article or otherwise furthered my career. My running wasn’t a secret, but I tried not to let S.L. know how much time I really spent on it. Often, I drastically readjusted my life to have time to get all the running in. Like the time I did an 18-mile run one morning and still made it early to a 10am meeting at school. Or all the times I spent not socializing with other people in the department so that I could go home and run instead. During my pilot study 3 years ago on Ometepe, I somehow managed to train for a marathon while also studying the monkeys, but all along I knew that I wasn’t doing either thing particularly well. I finally had to give in last year during the hellishness of proposal writing and preparing for prelims. It made me crazy. Seriously. I realized I needed running like some people need heroin.

The longer I spent away from running, the harder it was for me to get back into it. I never gave it up entirely, but I did give up the Long Run. It got so I couldn’t even make it around my neighborhood on my familiar 3-mile loop. The only times I could have a chance of finishing an entire run without walking half of it were on those rare occasions when I drug myself to running club and had the camaraderie of other people to drown out the crazies and exhaustion in my head. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to run, I just couldn’t make my legs do it. I wondered if I’d used up all my miles and would never be able to run, to really run, again.

I missed it terribly. There was nothing I loved more than a long run of 16 to 20 miles on a July morning when the temperature hovered near 90 degrees by 8am. How you get so hot you don’t even feel hot anymore; how you hurt so bad you don’t even feel pain anymore. When you run that far, your thoughts become almost psychedelic. You become pure motion, nothing physical matters. When you think you can’t go on, that you are going to end up a crumpled mass on the side of the road, there is only one thing to do: run faster. I remember those days: sun, sweat, Gatorade. Crisscrossing the town so many times that there’s nowhere I haven’t run.

Something from my life has been missing since I gave that up, or quit being able to do it. I’ve tried to run from time to time here on Ometepe, but it is not the same. The terrain is rocky and jagged even in the smooth places. You never know when a dog is going to dart out into the road and growl at you, with its teeth bared. People come out of their houses to stop and stare at you, like a freak or novelty. Teenage boys follow you on their bikes, leering, “Hola amorrrrrrr….” Its so much of a hassle. But little by little, I’ve been making myself get out there and do it on my rest days from the monkeys. I started gradually—an out and back 5km (3.1 mile) run interspersed with walking had me exhausted. But if I just kept going, I could make myself go 10K instead. Yesterday I pushed it a little bit farther, running maybe half a kilometer past my turn-around point, and I wasn’t even tired. Today I went out again and just kept going and going, until I realized I was at the fork in the road at a town called Santa Cruz, some 7km away from the Hacienda. On this road, that’s a veritable distance even by bike or bus. All I wanted was to keep running farther, but I was low on water and faced a return trip nonetheless. So I turned around and headed home, beginning to feel like myself for the first time in months. One of the muchachos who works at the Hacienda, Ileya (spelling?), caught up with me on bike not too long after. We chatted for a while before he went on ahead; it was not exactly like having the company of the running club, but it passed the time for a while. When I finally got back to the Hacienda with a 14km run under my belt, I had more energy than when I’d started. Despite the dogs and leering boys and trucks that don’t leave room for a pedestrian, I felt the best I’ve felt since my last marathon.

Afterwards, Rob and I went out to lunch at another hospedaje up the road. This one is a little more posh, and they have exorbitantly expensive home-made veggie burgers. The ultimate post long run recovery meal. It was so worth it. Food just tastes better, the sun shines brighter, and birds sing more sweetly after a long run. I wish I could bottle this feeling, but I know I can’t. The only way to keep it is to just keep running, so I’m already looking for my next marathon.

I didn't mean to go on so long about running; I wanted to write about some other things, but this post has become too long already! If anyone has made it all the way through this entry, thanks for reading. Until later then!