Run with Joy

If you missed a tackle or fumbled the ball, if you weren’t putting in enough effort or starting to lose focus, if you were just plain dumb and couldn’t understand what was being asked of you, if coach was angry or frustrated or feeling hopeless he’d tell you to go run.

Running was a punishment, a form of physical penance. As we circled the outer ring of our high school’s property, jogging slowly, wearing full football pads, there was plenty of time to think about what we’d done wrong and how we were going to make it better.

Running was also a hated assessment required by the State. Some bureaucrat wanted evidence that gym class still worked. Our teacher would break the bad news to us that next week we’d be running a timed mile, half mile, and quarter mile. She’d diligently record our times and put them in a chart somewhere. It was all done with the zest one has for filing their taxes. We’d dutifully struggle through those laps around the track, the bitter medicine required to partake in all the sweeter activities gym class had to offer.

At some point the way we viewed running slightly improved, it became a means to an end, the goal being to get in shape. (Though it has since fallen out of favor with the exercise community, who now believes the epitome of personal fitness is for a person to be one gigantic glute.)

We continued to run but refused to take it seriously. After all, running was a punishment, an unpleasant and painful activity that only those filled with self-hatred could find glee in. There were those people of course. The sadistic and mentally off persons who embraced the identity of “runner”. They seemed to revel in the blisters and dead toe nails, the long-distance runs on hot days.

Then there were the posers. People who wanted to seem hardcore to others, but were intelligent enough to avoid that running lifestyle. They could be found in the large metropolitan races, with tens of thousands participating and walking around in race swag. You’d find them near the start line, dressed in bright neon, sucking down some running gel while bad techno blared in the background. They ran for the social media photos, which you’d see several hours after they finished. The finisher medal would hang proudly in their office for years to come. But you’d never seen them run before and you’d never see them run again, for they did not run with joy. The long-distance race was merely a box to check off their lifelong ‘to do’ list.

This past weekend I entered into the bizarre running subculture of ultra-marathons. The Yankee Springs Trail Run is a yearly event held in western Michigan, running the trails at a large state park. I finished the 50k which is a little bit over thirty-one miles.

Several things surprised me. First, this was a small event and everybody there seemed to know each other. The “Running World” as a whole is like the student body at your local high school. There are different segments with different personalities. The sprinters and track stars are like the jocks, they are so cool that you’ll almost never see them around the long-distance crowd. Next them you have the regular 5k people, who are good, salt of the earth folks that will go on to raise solid families and maintain stable careers. Marathoners are like the nerds, loveable for a little while then insufferably annoying as time goes on.

The ultra-marathon clique are like the weird kids who sit under the bleachers at lunch break. They keep to themselves, have their own language, and are mostly oblivious to the outside world.

Despite this being the most difficult race I’ve completed up to this point, the race day atmosphere was nearly devoid of ego and competition. In fact, the race felt so uncompetitive it was a little bit jarring. Nobody was taking pictures, nobody was aggressively passing on the course, everyone seemed like they weren’t even in a hurry.

The other surprise was there were nearly no runners in their twenties and only a small handful in their thirties. This was an older crowd, the majority being in their forties, fifties and sixties. Clearly these people had been runners for thirty or even forty years. They’d been mellowed by age and time. Running wasn’t an accomplishment anymore and it clearly wasn’t a competition. To just keep playing the game was a reward in itself, and the friendships found in this community were the only validation needed to cross the finish line.

About halfway through the race I stopped at an aid station in the woods and took a moment to chat with one of the volunteers. He was a long-time member of this community and told a couple quick stories about his first 100k. There was something kind of off about this guy but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

I was cramping up a little bit and he handed me a jar of pickle juice to drink. Who knew that was the cure for muscle tightness? As I bid him farewell and started to run again he shouted something that felt like a bucket cold water being dumped on my head.

“Run with joy!”

***

The 31 mile race was 2 laps of just over 15.5 miles. On the second lap runners are allowed to have a pacer join them. Ben is my oldest friend and the person I’ve been running with the longest. We started running together in middle school.

Getting ready to take a big drink of pickle juice

***

Yes of course! Remember? Run with joy.

When it comes to the activities we do, rather than asking ourselves “Can I do this even better than before?” we should instead think, “Does this still bring me life?”

Winning is great, yet so few will ever have the talent, hard work, and youth necessary to finish first. If you dragged a hundred people off the street and made them race, a dedicated runner could beat them all. But that same runner squaring off against a hundred other runners will be fortunate to finish in the top thirty.

Competition often takes the joy out of whatever endeavor we engage in. Take a group of children happily playing together on the lawn and introduce the concepts of winning and losing. Make them keep score and let them begin to rank one another so that each may know exactly where they stand on the hierarchy. Let them see who is above and who is below and offer them opportunities to put even more of their classmates beneath them. You will witness things turn sour quite quickly.

It is so rare to come in first, but even still competition permeates our experience of running. We compete against adversaries both real and imagined. You may only be able to run a mile, or halfway around the block, or the length of the yard. And rather than enjoying the experience of moving the body, your mind inevitably makes comparisons with others. Your mental adversary tells you, “That’s not good enough. If you can’t run like Usain Bolt or Eliud Kipchoge, or your cousin Bill, or your distant Facebook contact, or the lady who just passed you on the course, then what’s the point? Be better or don’t bother playing.”

You choose not to run at all and are thereby robbed of a potentially joyful experience.

But worse still is competing against our previous selves. Can you beat your time from five years ago? Are you able to keep going like when you were twenty-five? Do you still have it? Or is this run through the woods, this race on the weekend, this jog in the park overwhelming evidence that the inevitable bodily decline found in all of nature has begun and is at work in you?

Sounds like a miserable waste of time! Maybe running is a punishment after all.