As I huffed and puffed toward the 2-mile mark during a race on a chilly but sunny Saturday a week or so ago, I contemplated the five stages of grief.
First, a few words on why I run.
I started running at age 40 ½. Not because I had any particular predilection toward running. In fact, I often declared to my running-obsessed friends during my 20s and 30s that the only time I would run is if bears were chasing me. I have short legs and bad sinuses; I wasn’t genetically built for running.
But I wasn’t exercising as I got into my 40s, and my doctor suggested that moving around might improve my inherited cholesterol problem. (Spoiler: it didn’t.) At the time, I had three children, including two under the age of 5. So making time and money for frequent visits to the gym wasn’t an option. Instead, I just grabbed the nearest athletic shoes I had and started running a few times a week.
Now, 6 ½ years later, I’ve learned painful lessons about not running in cheap shoes, which podcasts and music make my run more enjoyable and how to navigate the hills around my neighborhood. I’ve become a respectable runner—not too fast but not embarrassingly slow, either. And, yes, I now miss running when I have to pause for illness or travel.
While I’m glad I took up running and I miss doing it when I can’t, I don’t love it in the conventional sense. My competitive self enjoys trying to continually improve, but running makes me out of breath, and I don’t feel most of the benefits—such as increased energy—until after I’ve changed out of my running clothes. Also, running itself can be boring, which is why earbuds and something good to listen to are a must for me.
I run in a half-dozen 5K races a year because it motivates me and, as I mentioned before, I’m competitive.
Elisabeth Kubler Ross and David Kessler wrote that there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This was on my mind as I ran in this recent race and realized my mind was going through the same stages.
It was literally freezing cold as the race started, and I quickly got annoyed as the route left asphalt—my favorite running surface—and gave way to gravel, which I loathe. Even my well-made Brooks running shoes periodically slip on gravel, and it’s hard to get that same “rebound” energy with every step on absorbing gravel that you get on a hard surface.
So, at first, I tried to deny that much of this race would be run on a combination of dirt and gravel. I told myself that that partially frozen gravel was almost as good as asphalt, in that it was not as loose as regular gravel. Then I got angry: Angry at the race organizers, angry at my slightly slipping feet, angry at the cold weather.
Around 1.6 miles, the race route’s turnaround point loomed. I made the U-turn, slowed to a fast walking pace for about 30 seconds to catch my breath, then sped up again. By now, I was bargaining with myself as my lungs burned slightly in the cold, smoky winter air. After all, if I ran a slow race, who would care besides me? Wasn’t it enough that I braved the cold to run one last race in 2017? I’d still finish ahead of many other runners if I slowed down.
I was depressed: My lungs ached a bit, I was so warm I had taken off my ear-warming stocking cap, this didn’t seem fun anymore, all the wrong songs kept coming up in my shuffled running playlist. That gave way to acceptance as I ran the last mile: Let’s just get this over with.
By this point, I was in the last half-mile. I slowed down one last time to catch my breath before getting back into my running pace as I approached the finish line. I knew they were taking photos at the finish line, so I placed my cap back upon my head to hide my sweaty, messy hair.
And then I saw the red digital numbers of the running clock at the finish line. They displayed a number somewhere in the middle of 35:00 and 36:00. My mind quickly did mental math: They had started the 5K at 10 minutes after the 10K runners started.
Did I really just run that under 26 minutes, which would be a personal best? No wonder I was so tired.
And here, my running begs comparison to my profession of writing. I’m suspicious when writing a story seems too easy. My best stories, the ones that earn my editors’ praise, always are the stories that took the most time and struggle. They’re the stories that I turn in because they’re due, not because I’m happy with them. I hold impossibly high expectations of myself, and I always fall short.
Back to that finish line. I sipped my hot chocolate and waited impatiently with my fellow runners for our times to be posted. After an hour of listening to Christmas music on speakers at the finish line, cooling back down and sipping more hot chocolate, we were told there was a technical glitch. Our times wouldn’t be available for a few days.
A couple days later, our times were posted. My time: 25:55, or a pace of 8:21 per mile. No grief over that.