This month marks 10 years since I became a real runner. That seems like a milestone worth commemorating. Buckle up folks, this is bound to be a long one.
I wish I knew the precise date I went for the run that started me down the long and winding path I’ve been on ever since, but alas that information is lost to the universe. That is partly because there was nothing particularly special about it. I’d gone for plenty of runs before. Cross country was the first thing I ever signed up for in high school and at various points during my adolescence and teenage years I got into running for a few months, mostly as a means to the end of looking and feeling good – not for the sake of running.
Penance for Pizza
That all changed at some point in May 2011. I had just gotten back from a winter in the Yukon working on a research project with Parks Canada that I had fallen ass-backwards into. The Yukon was incredible. It was beautiful, I met fantastic people, I had adventures, I even saw a freaking lynx. The only rough part about it was that the winter I spent up there saw an accumulation of snow that managed to raise the eyebrows of even the Parks staff I was working with – real Yukoners.
The avalanche risk was in the red zone for the majority of the time I spent up there and, as such, I spent a lot of time confined to easy trails or the room where I was staying. I also got to know the fine folks working at the Domino’s in Whitehorse more than any person should. As a result I had fallen out of shape. This was especially disappointing given that I had just completed what I dubbed “The Year of Adventure” wherein I spent every month of 2010 climbing hiking or paddling my way into the far-flung corners of my part of the world. Something needed to be done.
Fortunately I came home to the job I had left at Adventure Guide Inc., the outdoor gear store in Waterloo, ON that not only paid my bills but also made my camping gear addiction moderately more affordable. Also fortunately, they sold running shoes. On my first shift back I bought a pair of Vibram FiveFingers and set my sights on regaining my lost physical prowess.
It didn’t go well.
I remember my first run in those shoes as vividly as I remember all of the torturously awful events of my life. It was unseasonably hot and humid for May. The air was so thick you could almost drink it and I struggled for every sip. Google Maps suggests that the route I ran that day was over 6K, but that doesn’t seem right. I remember mapping it the day I did it and it coming out to around 5. Maybe my memory isn’t as sharp as I thought, but what I do know is that I drank all the water I brought 2K into it at a full stop at the bottom of a hill and it took me 45 minutes to get home.
Stepping into my mom’s overly air-conditioned house, drenched in sweat, saved my life. I glanced at the comically huge clock on the living room wall, noting my time. I knew the only way I’d ever run again was if I made it a little competition with myself to shave a few minutes off. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this little mental trick is what flipped a weirdly competitive switch in me. It’s also, I’ve come to learn, the entire basis of endurance sports as a hobby. All of the running friends I’ve made in the years since share the same compulsion to beat their past selves rather than actually winning a race.
Achievement 1 Unlocked.
The Fitocracy Years
Somehow I managed to keep at it for the rest of 2011. I can’t say how many kilometers I ran or how often I laced up my shoes (the data before I starting logging runs online is non-existent) but I remember being fairly consistent, running at least a couple of times a week until I had dropped 25ish pounds to get back to a more typical weight for me. The conditioning was also a bonus on hikes, bike rides and miscellaneous other adventures.
I like to think I would have kept at it indefinitely on my own, but I probably wouldn’t have. In September 2011, Marianne and I moved to Vancouver and lived with each other for the first time. She started running with me and we explored the trails around the city and on Burnaby Mountain, where our apartment was. The company certainly kept me going. I also started in the Resource and Environmental Management master’s program at SFU and quickly made friends who, it turns out, were also into running and outdoor adventure. Go figure.
That was all well and good, but the next big step in me taking running somewhat seriously as a hobby came out of the blue when one of my good friends sent me a link to a website he found where you could log exercise and some algorithm would turn it into points, like in a video game. Within days all my friends from back in Ontario and many of my new BC pals had signed up for Fitocracy and so commenced two solid years of weekly challenges to see who could run the furthest, do the most push ups, or just rack up the most points.
Fitocracy lit a competitive fire in me that I didn’t know was there. In the past couple weeks, I’ve made an attempt to go back through all the logs that website has of my activities between January 2012 and June 2014 (when I got my running watch, which became my main means for tracking runs) but there are too many to tally in the time I am willing to put into that thankless task. I did manage to add up the kilometers to the end of April 2013 and the figure is 921 km. Not bad, considering I wasn’t training for anything and was also hiking in ever spare moment I could find.
The competition was incredible and I owe my friends a deep debt of gratitude for making it so much fun. I remember many days of heading out for multiple runs in the morning and at the end of the day just because I needed to chase down someone who had pulled ahead of me by 200 meaningless points in a challenge I can’t remember the winner of. It was fantastic.
Skipping Class to Run My First Half Marathon
Probably the most memorable event from the years spent of Fitocracy came in the first few weeks I was using it, while it was still fresh and I was at peak motivation. I was sitting in a Research Methods class with my new grad school friends. The class was mandatory, but covered material I had been over a bunch of times already in the extra stats classes I took during my undergrad (I’ve always loved data). The lectures were also 2 hours long and occasionally happened on Fridays. It was brutal.
On one particular Friday – January 13, 2012 – I found my attention drifting from the class to the view out the window. It was raining in classic west coast winter fashion. A steady drizzle that takes the billion shades of green you will find in a temperate rainforest and makes each of them just a little deeper and richer. It just so happened that the classroom we were in that day looked out over the ring road around campus, which also had a trail that ran mostly parallel to it. I ran that trail a lot. One lap of the campus was almost exactly 5K. With numbers already drifting around in my head I began to wonder how many laps of the campus I could run before my body totally quit on me. It seemed like a much better use of time than learning about ANOVAs again, or whatever we were talking about.
At the halfway break of the lecture I walked up to the professor – a young guy who I remember liking, but I can’t remember much about aside from him possibly having red hair and a beard – and lied right to his face. I told him I had a dentist appointment. It was a lazy lie and he probably didn’t believe it (who comes to half a class when they have a dentist appointment booked in the middle of it?), but he let me leave. I walked back to my campus apartment, changed into running clothes and set out.
I could make up some stuff about the run itself, but the truth is I don’t remember anything about it save for two things:
- Every time I ran by the class I was supposed to be in I got a little nervous that the prof would see me, but I was also hoping some of my friends would notice and think I was some kind of rebel.
- At some point probably around lap 3 I decided I was running a half marathon and on my last lap I finished the extra 1.1 km on the university track in the pouring rain. I almost collapsed, but it felt amazing.
That run did a few things for me. It introduced me to my favourite racing distance (half marathon), it set a timing benchmark for me to try and beat (2 hours and 14 minutes), and it inspired me to see what these legs could really do… I’m still finding out.
Watch Out
By the spring of 2014 a lot had changed. Marianne and I moved to Ottawa for a brief stint in 2013 before deciding we weren’t done with the west coast and moving back to Vancouver at the start of the year. I also wasn’t a student anymore, having taken a research job with a not-for-profit that saw me working at a surprisingly nice downtown office and living in a shockingly affordable apartment in Burnaby. Life was good.
With memories of my student lifestyle still fresh in my mind, I was shocked at the effect that actually being paid for my work was having on my bank account. For the first time in my adult life I had some disposable income and I found myself researching GPS running watches in my spare time. It didn’t help that I could walk to The Running Room on my lunch break and look at the watch display with the same wide-eyed fascination that Alvin had looking at that harmonica in The Chipmunks Christmas Special. Sadly, no kind old lady every decided to buy me a watch.
Eventually after months of wearing myself down and convincing my wife that this was not a stupid waste of money, I bought a Garmin Forerunner 620. I probably would have been just as happy with the 220 (which was about $200 cheaper), but the data geek in me needed to know my vertical oscillation and ground-contact time stats… I have a problem.
The first time I turned the watch on, I was standing in my office looking out the window at the Vancouver Seawall. It was a good thing the battery only had enough charge for me to finish the set up, otherwise I probably would have run myself to death right then and there.
As it turned out, the first run I ever logged with that watch ended up being with one of my best friends while he was visiting from Ontario. We ran around a grueling canyon route in North Vancouver. It was one of the most fun runs I’ve ever done. The excitement of a new toy combined with the excitement of seeing my friend and running through what it probably one of the nicest environments on the planet was really working for me.
I very quickly fell in love with having a running-focused computer on my wrist and set my sites on newer and bigger achievements. My newfound motivation would lead me to places I never dreamed of visiting when I set off on that first run and help me deal with some of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in my life. But more on that in Part 2.
Yelling at the Moon 