Depois de uma longa e tenebrosa ausência, que em parte foi causada pelo fato de que eu estava treinando duro para correr meia maratona, estou de volta ao blog. E segue aqui a primeira de uma série de posts sobre essa aventura, que explica o título do post. Peço desculpas aos que não lêem em inglês, mas não tive tempo de traduzir.
Are you a runner?
“No, I am not”.
This is the main thought that went through my head in the last few weeks, but specially as I finished my last long run, 22 kilometers, a few hours ago. I do not remember doing something so unpleasant and painful in my life since my divorce. I could not recall how I ended up signing for a half-marathon and being forced to train for it. But there I was, puffing and struggling to do the “assigned distance” for that day.
One thing that I found out in training for a half-marathon is that running long distances gives you a lot of time to think. Initially I thought this would be a productive use of my time: as an academic, I would be better off thinking while running, as opposed to sitting at my desk. But I soon found out that it does not work that way. To be alone with one’s thoughts for such an extended period of time is boring and tedious – or it may be that my thoughts are boring and tedious. I wonder if people who enjoy training for marathons have more interesting things to debate with themselves… Anyway, for me it was boring. Academics have classes, conferences, or at least a colleague next door by whom they can run an idea and discuss their thoughts. The days I spend alone, I am reading others’ people work, which is like a dialogue as well, only that it is not live. Doing long runs alone is like hearing a boring two hours lecture given by yourself to…yourself. And let me tell you, I am a tough crowd. Indeed, I am the kind of crowd to which I never want to give a lecture again in my life.
Because I did not like to be alone with my thoughts for such an extended period of time, I started listening to audio books during my runs. Some of them were dull; others were interesting. But even the dull ones had a major advantage over staying alone with my own thoughts: they were about things that I did not know or had not thought about. So, they distracted me from the fact that I was doing something rather unpleasant. But I still regret having signed up for this race and kept wondering how this happened.
I think it all started in an academic conference. After my presentation (to a much friendlier crowd than myself), T. came to me and asked:
- Are you a runner?
Totally taken by surprise, I replied: how do you know?
- Because you have a runner’s body.
I should confess that I became very proud of my runner’s body after that day, because I did not know I had one! The problem is that once you’ve got it, you get really attached to it. This is why I got so mad when I heard T. using the same sentence with another person a week later. It was another attempt to recruit a member for the recently formed running club, of which I was now part. Initially, I felt insulted. Actually, I was very close to throwing a fit:
- “How come you are saying that to her? This person clearly does not have a runner’s body!”
Luckily, I decided to control myself. Imagine the headlines: university professor charged for offending a complete stranger. Not sure what I would be charged for, but it seems to me that someone could get in trouble for doing something like that. As T. repeated the question – and the fake compliment -- multiple times to various people over the course of the many months that followed, I got used to it. And I can truly attest that there is no discrimination in the use of that sentence. As long as you are a breathing human being, you face the risk of finding a stranger called T. tapping over your shoulder and asking: “Are you a runner? You have a runners’ body.”
Despite not caring about it anymore, the sentence is important for this inquiry about how I got myself into this. This is where it all started. It was this sentence that drowned me into the running club, and lead to the long-winding road that brought me to the despicable situation of running 22 kilometers while listening to a stupid audiobook and deeply regretting it. That sentence was the first sign. It was not only that lady that I was about to offend who did not have a runner’s body. I (and all the long list of people harassed by T. on a daily basis) also did not. But it took me a few years and over two months of training for a half marathon to realize that.
How could I fool myself for such a long time? Being a university professor, I would like to think that I am smarter than the average Joe. Yet I am confronted with the fact that most of the average Joes invited to join our running club realized that “they did not have a runner’s body” faster than I did. If my stupidity is to blame, the mystery is solved and we can all go home now. However, I would like to think that I am not stupid (I guess the average Joe does too, but that is beyond the point here). The point is this: because I am not ready to accept how stupid I am, I still need a persuasive account of why an (moderately, my fellow runners would add) intelligent person comes to wrongly believe – with such intensity – that she is a runner.
If I am not as stupid as some other people in this running club will try to suggest, what is left? What made me believe I was a runner? To answer that question, I probably need to understand why I accepted the invitation that followed the question, the invitation to join the running club. Why did I showed up on that Saturday to run at 7am, a ridiculously early time for any member of civilized society to be out of bed on a non-working day? I don’t know. I guess I was lonely. At that point, I did not have much of a social life. So, going out with people seemed like an interesting proposition for someone who had absolutely nothing else to do, except work.
One thing is certain: for me, the running club was not about the exercise. I never had trouble following my running routine almost religiously, every other day. Running is a habit that I acquired while doing my doctorate and has stayed with me since then. Running 5 or 7Km was the way I found to reset my mental computer, after a day of intense intellectual work. It was the mental benefits of running, not the physical ones that pushed me into it. But except for running and work, there was not much going on in my life when T. made the invitation. I had been extremely disciplined about everything that had the label “obligation” and very undisciplined about anything that had the label “fun”. So when I showed up that Saturday morning I was just looking for a group that would force me out of the house once or twice a week to relax and socialize. It was those things that I did not have enough discipline to do on my own.
Now that I look back, I understand why I was hooked at that first meeting, over two years ago. Everybody hugged me when I arrived, which was very different from the handshake that I was used to in Canadian soil (it is often a welcoming handshake, but it ain’t a hug, if you know what I mean…). I liked that. No formalities. And I did not even see the run go by. I was getting acquainted with the rest of the group and being amazed with the fact that I was meeting so many people from so many different walks of life in one single day. There was a nurse, a financial advisor, a fashion industry executive, a person from the pharmaceutical industry, and T., who was an academic, like me. I felt like I had been living in a bubble all these years. If I stayed away from T., I thought, my days of hanging out with academics and talking about work were over!
But the best part was still to come. After the run, we sat down for coffee and had a lively conversation about online dating. One of the runners had used the services with great success and was now happily married. And she was not shy of sharing some of her tips about avoiding whackos, stockers, liars and – most importantly -- how to screen for boring people. Two of the divorced women in the club got very interested in the adventure and seemed to be planning on getting together later that day to try to use it. And I was there finding this entire interaction very refreshing. The topic was refreshing; the people easiness to talk about the topic was surprisingly refreshing; and the fact that the topic was not related to legal issues was extremely refreshing.
After this, it did not take long for me to be completely at ease with the group. “What happens on the road stays on the road”. This became our motto. It meant that I did not need to be stiff, try to say smart things, or even behave properly while running with the group. No topics were forbidden, no jokes were censured, and no behaviour was judged (as long as no animals endured any type of physical or emotional pain in the process, but I cannot say the same about the runners…). This was my liberation. It was like running on mental underwear. And I became so comfortable with the group that some other members of the running club will be happy to share stories with you suggesting that I may have been too comfortable at times…
But the point is that there was no serious training, obsession about races, or anything like that. Running was just an excuse to meet. Indeed, our social activities were much more frequent and reliable than our runs. Few people showed up for the runs, but everybody showed up to the dinner parties, birthday cakes, holiday celebrations, or any of the gatherings that happened with no particular reason.
Then, Jaja joined the group. She showed up one Saturday morning at the coffee shop where we normally meet. Luckily, she had not been a victim of T’s indiscriminate recruitment policies. Instead, somebody else had recruited her. So, she came without thinking that she had a runner’s body. She smiled and ran with us. And I did not know what to think at first. She seemed to be nice and interested in what I was saying, despite the fact that she took 6 months to memorize which country I was from. Every week she had a different guess. All her guesses were in the same continent, Latin America. But she would never try to guess Brazil. She mentioned Argentina, Chile, Peru… you name it. But never Brazil. I did not know what to make of it. I would correct her one week, and then one week later she would turn and ask again which country I was from. This question gave me the impression that she was not paying attention to anything that I was saying.
But then we clicked. Or I think I got her. I think she operates at a different level of cognition. She knows exactly how I am feeling, despite the fact that she cannot remember which country I am from. And I am exactly the opposite: I have no clue about what I am feeling, let alone what others are feeling... So, I guess we just learned to interact with each other in a respectful and constructive way. Or maybe I just accepted the fact that she did not know which country I was from, but she had good intentions and a big heart. And this is what really matters. Then I opened up to her, and I think the group slowly started to open up as well. And Jaja proved to be this really interesting and fun person, who slowly started to change everything. She created a logo for our group, she created funny nicknames for each of us (and she may be even willing to share it, if you ask nicely), she made reflective bands with belts to make sure our runs on Saturday mornings were safe and artistic. She has so much energy that it is almost contagious.
Despite all these nice qualities, she may be the one to blame for getting me into believing that I was a runner. Until she joined the club, we just went for our regular runs and refreshing conversations over coffee. As T. always said, “we are a drinking club with a running problem”. But then Jaja started signing up for races, and we started following her. She would sign up for a new one, and there we were signing up as well. Then, she started finishing at really impressive times, and getting excited to improve in her next race. It was clear that we would never run this fast, but we did feel that we needed to pick up our game a little bit. So, we started training more seriously as well.
There is a reason Jaja got addicted to training: she is a fast runner. By fast, I mean, really fast. She qualified for Boston in her first marathon (if you are not a runner, you probably do not know what this means. In this case, just trust me: she is really fast). And she has more energy than the world could possibly consume. So, running is perfect for her.
At this point, you may be thinking to yourself: the fact that she made you take running more seriously is a good thing, right? Wrong. Jaja has so much energy that she can indulge herself in the previous evening, drink a lot, dance until the sunrise, and do her training or even have a stellar race the next morning. We don’t. The rest of the club and I need to choose between drinking, dancing or running. We can’t do any combination of two items in the previous list; let alone a combination of the three items, which is what Jaja normally does. This means that for us mortals training reduces drinking, and vice-versa. The BJ (before Jaja) period in the running club was tipping towards more drinking, but the AJ period was totally tipped towards training. Indeed, in contrast to those glorious days in which drinking outpaced the running, now I feel like I would need to become an alcoholic to be drinking more than I am running.
Maybe Jaja is not to blame alone, and we got ourselves into this together, somehow. Isn’t this what they call the power of the group? If it is, runners of the world be aware: the power of the group is evil, malicious and misleading! It will trick you into painful training that does not leave any free time for partying. Be careful! If you see the power of the group coming, run in the opposite direction! Just make sure your running club is running with you so you do not find yourself partying alone later…
At the end, I still do not know how I got myself into this.
But this is about to end: my last long run is done and next weekend is the race. People keep telling me that I will be proud of myself once I finish the race. They say: “this is a big achievement”. I don’t think it is. It was a waste of my precious time. I can assure you that I will not be proud or happy. I will just be relieved. If there is something that I achieved with this training was the certainty that I am not a runner. And I am hoping that once the race is over we can go back to being a drinking group with a running problem.
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