My full return from the injury that ended my third running dynasty was a gradual process. At first, I struggled to run ten minutes pain-free. Slowly, the strength came back into my legs. In April, I was able to get through a basketball game without a problem by controlling my acceleration and limiting my pace. In May, I was completing short runs as I described last week. At the end of the month, I put myself to the test and managed to get through twenty miles of running over thirty-six hours for a pointless relay race I’d committed to in the winter - even though I ran at half-speed on the last two legs, I made it to the end. By June, I was locked into a regular morning running routine. I wasn’t quite back but I was trending in the right direction in my new role as a morning runner.
The Fourth Running Dynasty: July 2015 – March 2018
Start reason: Recovery from prior injury
End reason: Applying lessons learned three years ago
July proved influential to the start of my next dynasty. It wasn’t just that my mom died in hospice, it was more that I’d spent some good time with her there and had the chance to talk about some things. The conversation I remember most vividly came one afternoon when I’d asked her if she ever dreamed of anything. She said she did, that in fact the night before she had dreamed about running.
This exchange must have had some effect on me.
At the end of June, my conclusion was that running a short distance a few days a week was a good balance for my physical and emotional health. By the end of July, my reasoning had changed slightly, perhaps not to the self-destructive heights of the prior winter, but more like a decision that I should defer changes to my running mentality until I was sure I’d run myself into the ground.
To put this another way, although I'd just learned that I was using running as a way to manage my mood - and should therefore prioritize remaining injury-free until I was feeling better - I decided instead to risk injury by just running as much as possible. I suppose I can relate in some odd way to those who become addicted to painkillers - if I feel better after running five miles, why not run every day? And wouldn't I feel even better if I ran ten miles a day?
Looking back, I see that I went from a morning runner to a mourning runner, likely at some point in August. The difference between this time and my prior dynasty was that I wasn’t restricting my long runs to just the weekend afternoons - I was also getting out on weekdays, and in the early mornings, and late at night. My longest runs never set personal records but the increased frequency really ran up my weekly mileage. I went from the almost entirely weekend-driven twenty to twenty-five miles a week to between thirty and forty miles a week spread out over seven days. I’d thought I’d used running in the past to pull me through emotional lows and establish a sense of stability. However, a closer look at this dynasty makes any past efforts look feeble in comparison. It just got worse after I lost my job and the situation continued to deteriorate the longer I remained unemployed.
I eventually set aside my misery just long enough to fill out an application for a volunteer role at a local hospice. My application was met with some initial skepticism. It was nothing personal. The response was based on a simple observation that life was a list of risk factors for major depression – death of a parent, sudden job loss, extended unemployment – and such people historically did very poorly in the volunteer role. I pushed on because I thought such risk factors were outside my control and therefore should be ignored. Plus, I was doing the best I could by relying on what worked in the past – running – to help me work through this time.
Unfortunately, my running was introducing a possible fourth risk factor into the equation - chronic injury. This risk increased every time I pushed through discomfort or pain during a run but I wasn't doing anything about it. I suppose the problem was in the trade-off – I could stop running and feel better physically, but how would I regulate my mood? I didn’t know, so I kept running, perhaps motivated by a vague notion that I would figure it out, and slowly the foot pain I was running through started to bother me when I wasn’t running.
I list March 2018 as the end of the dynasty but it's not easy to pinpoint the exact moment I decided to slow down. It would make for a good conclusion to this story that I started to feel better about things in general and decided that I was ready to consider running less. I can’t say for sure when I turned the proverbial corner, though, so I think a more truthful story is that I acknowledged my foot pain as a problem to solve rather than a problem to tolerate, perhaps because the positive experience of running was now being outweighed by the negative experience of the injured foot.
It was a long process - first, I tried making some basic changes to my footwear so that I could keep running while I solved the problem. Initially, I did see some sporadic improvement in my feet. Unfortunately, this didn’t prove a consistent solution and my running performance soon resume its decline. At some point, my response changed - instead of pushing through, I slowed down. For whatever reason, I'd decided to acknowledge my body’s signals. I could never have done this back when I felt I needed to run for so much more than just mileage.
My decision around a year ago to take a break from running was a difficult decision to make. It was the first time I’ve ever stopped running despite being able to run. And although my break lasted only a month, it was still a difficult time for me. As I look back on my running history as a whole, however, I feel much better about that decision to take a break. Like with each time I’ve stopped running in the past, the end of a dynasty left me with important knowledge about myself – that I valued my place on the basketball team, that change is a way to unlock my potential, that stability comes from regularly giving it all. The lesson from the fourth dynasty was subtler but it left me with perhaps the most valuable perspective yet – no matter how far I go or how hard I run, at some point I have to come back and deal with the things I’d left behind.
