Half the marathon, all the fun

As late as Saturday evening, I still didn’t feel certain that I could run 13 uninterrupted miles, even though it was less than twelve hours until the start time of the first half-marathon for which I’d ever registered.

I was fairly confident. I’d set my sights on a half-marathon back in November, and for the past eight months, I’d been doing weekly runs of 10-12 miles, along with daily runs of about 2-4 miles. I was within spitting distance of that 13.1-mile mark; I just had never actually done the entire distance.

“The problem,” I told my friend Nicole, herself a distance runner who only recently started competing in half-marathons, “is that when I finish these ten- or eleven-mile runs, I always feel okay. But I never feel like, ‘Gee, I really feel like going another mile or two. Or three.’ I’m just really glad it’s done.”

Nicole assured me I needn’t worry. “You just take your longest comfortable distance,” she told me. “Then you add another mile for the confidence that wearing a race bib gives you, and another mile on top of that for the boost from the spectators.” If she was right, that would put be right up close to the 13.1-mile mark, and knowing it was an oceanside course made me think that by 12.5 miles, I’d be able to see the finish line. Surely once I could see it, I could reach it.

All of this sounded plausible to me. Sure, I could probably run 13.1 miles. Probably. But I couldn’t possibly know for sure until I tried.

So on Sunday morning, I tried, and I’m very happy to say I succeeded. I didn’t run it fast or particularly skillfully. In fact, out of a field of 2,189 runners, I came in 2,007. “I prefer to think of it as 182 runners still behind me when I finished,” I told my sister.

But even as I said it, I knew that was the wrong attitude. It shouldn’t matter that there were nearly 200 people who ran the course slower than I did. It shouldn’t even matter that there was anyone who ran the course slower than I did. It should matter only that I finished.

And even that, as I often remind myself, doesn’t matter all that much in the greater picture. Running may be good for you physically, but it’s also, to some degree, frivolous. I’ve maintained a daily running streak of more than 2,500 days – next month I’ll hit the seven-year mark – but as I often say when people congratulate me for that, there are far more worthwhile things I could try to do every day.

Yet even frivolity may have its purpose. I’ve run only about a half-dozen races in my life – a mix of 5k’s, 10k’s, and five-milers until Sunday's longer route – and one thing each race has in common is that once it begins, I feel a sense of liberation from all other cares. For the duration of the time I’m running, I give myself permission to think only about the run. Not work assignments; not family issues; not national or international political conflict. Just putting one foot in front of another, that most primal of actions.

Sunday was no exception; it just lasted longer. For more than two hours – okay, I’ll admit it: two hours and 39 minutes – running was all that mattered. Yes, that’s frivolous, but it’s also healing. The rest was waiting for me. I had plenty of opportunities on Monday to catch up on work and family and national headlines. Sunday morning, it was just me and the race course. And the blue sky and the sun. And the cheering spectators. And the sparkling ocean. And all the oxygen I needed, in the air around me every time I breathed in.

As the race ended, I almost wished I wasn’t quite at the finish line yet. Miles 9 through 12 had become a little bit arduous, but the final mile melted away. I almost felt like I hadn’t savored it quite enough before it ended.

Frivolous. Yes, that’s true. But also magnificent. And I was so very happy to have reached this personal goal.

A fall, and a helping hand

A few miles into a Memorial Day weekend bike ride on the Capital Crescent Trail, my 9-year-old nephew Andrew and I pulled over for a water break. Below us off the side of the trail was the Potomac River, with kayakers drifting by. In the distant background stood the iconic spire of the Washington Monument. Pretty cool view for a bike ride, I thought to myself as we took out our water bottles.

Then we heard a tumble and a shriek. Just a hundred feet behind us, a runner we'd passed a few minutes earlier was rolling across the pavement, entangled with a bicyclist. Another bicyclist had come to a stop just in front of them.

"You stay with our bikes; I'll go see if I can help," I said to Andrew.

The woman was clearly okay; she was sitting up on the trail by the time I reached her, whimpering just a little bit as she apologized to the bicyclists. "I know I darted into your way," she said. "I saw a snake by the side of the trail and it started me, so I jumped to the left. I knew you were passing me; I don't know why I did that. It was just that I was so startled by the snake."

The bicycling couple were shaken as well. Though no one seemed angry, I did not feel that they were being particularly comforting, perhaps because they too were distressed. I knew exactly how the runner felt. I had taken a bad fall while running last summer, and I still remember how jarring and disorienting it was even though, like her, I was just a little scraped up with no serious damage done.

But when I fell last summer, the one passer-by who stopped to help continued on his way as soon as I said, almost reflexively, that I was all right, and immediately afterwards I regretted my own self-sufficiency. I had been frightened and in pain. I wished I hadn't been so quick to tell him I was okay. I wished he'd stayed a little longer to be sure.

So when I reached the runner, I put my hand on her bare and sweaty arm and tried to offer comforting words. "It's okay," I said. "I know how you feel. Rattled." 

As I touched her, I thought briefly about how some people would not want a stranger laying hands on their bare skin, and I felt momentarily presumptuous, but I had to trust myself that what I remembered needing when I had been the fallen runner -- company, comfort, reassurance -- was what she would want also. I asked her if she'd like a drink of water, and she said yes, so I brought her my water bottle.

"I'm okay," she said. "Just a little scraped up."

"I know, but it's scary. Breathe slowly and deeply," I told her.

In just a minute or two, she was ready to resume her run. I felt as if something had come full circle, as if I'd finally had a chance to reclaim the comfort no one had offered me when I fell while running. It was as if the reverse of what really happened had taken place, as if I'd fallen again and this time been offered a helping hand, simply because I was able to offer one myself.

Later in the day, I saw a Facebook post from a friend who was widowed over a year ago describing a weekend party she had just attended at which she met a woman who had recently gone through the same kind of loss. This friend wrote about the satisfaction of being able to reach out with empathy and help, and about the perspective that the encounter gave her on her own long-term grieving process and all the healing that had taken place for her in recent months.

The two events are not comparable, but the sense of healing that an empathetic moment gave both of us seemed to have a tinge of similarity. It made me think about how trauma -- whether minor, like my tumble, or severe, like her loss -- may be the ultimate pass-it-forward model. We heal when we can help someone else through the same thing. And for that reason, I was so glad to have pulled over for a water break just when that runner fell.

Snow and ice and a polar vortex: keeping up the streak

So far, 2014 has been a challenging year for maintaining a running streak.

 A storm on the second day of January brought over a foot of snow, making the footpath on which I normally run unusable since the town’s budget doesn’t cover clearing the footpaths. This left me with the option of running multiple random laps up and down our long common driveway, from one house to the next to the next and out to the road, sort of a starfish shape, each complete tracing of the starfish earning me about three-quarters of a mile. Which meant I needed to trace the course at least twice even to earn the minimum one-mile requirement that keeps a streak runner on the USRSA registry. And since one mile isn’t really much of a workout, if I want any of the other benefits of running aside from remaining qualified as a streak runner, I needed to do a little more than that. Three or four laps along the branches of the common driveway gets very, very tedious in very little time.

But before the snow had any chance of melting, the polar vortex descended. I had never run in sub-zero temperatures before, but I did last week. Not for very long at a time, though. On the handful of days that it was under ten degrees, I put on as many layers as I could wear while still remaining upright and did just a mile. I found that by wearing tights, pants, a t-shirt, a heavy sweatshirt, and then a lined hoodie belonging to my husband, with sleeves that ran a good four inches past my fingertips and a hem that ended almost at my knees, I was plenty warm enough, at least when the wind wasn’t blowing directly into my face. But all the apparel gave me the shape and mobility of the Abominable Snowman. A mile was all I could manage before the sheer weight of all the clothing exhausted me.

Finally at the end of last week, the sun shone and the chill abated a little bit. It was warmer by only a few degrees, but that was enough to start the melting process.

Which, of course, meant ice.

So I put on my YakTrax, which give me decent traction in the snow but, like the layers and layers of warm clothing, also adds a certain ponderousness to the run. Yak Trax aren’t heavy or clumsy, but just cumbersome enough to make the run tiresome.

And then on Friday I tired of the Yak Trax and convinced myself that the layer of powdery new snow would provide enough traction that the ice wouldn’t be a problem. I enjoyed a pleasant run that day. It wasn’t too cold and the powder did feel nice on my unfettered feet. Until the last ten yards or so of the route, when I hit an ice patch that was invisible under the new snow and fell flat on my back.

My first thought was typical of a streak runner: I was within a snowball’s throw of the two-mile finishing point, so I’d definitely cleared my necessary daily mile and the run still counted. My second thought was that nothing hurt too badly.

But it’s hard to fall flat on your back on the ice and not hurt at all. Soon I realized how sore my tailbone was, and I’d wrenched an arm while trying to catch myself as well.

So it was a tough week for running. But on Saturday, the temperature was well into the thirties by the time I was dressing for my run, and the ice was gone from the roadway. I ran a warm, comfortable, safe, easy ten miles, savoring every step all the more for all the weather-related travails of the preceding days.

“Doesn’t a mile on the treadmill still count toward the streak?” a friend asked on one of the coldest days last week.

Well, yes. According to the rules of the United States Running Streak Association, running on a treadmill is just fine. But I consider being outdoors for at least ten minutes part of the challenge along with completing the mile, I told her. I like having a streak of not only running every day but spending at least a small interval of time outside very day. No matter what the weather. In snow. On ice. During a polar vortex.

Still, this week is better. The air is milder; much of the snow has melted. We’re not even halfway through January; more winter weather will probably occur before the season ends. But days like the ones we had last week remind streakers that it’s almost always possible to get that mile in, one way or another. It gave me a chance to become ever more creative at dressing for the cold weather, and it reminded me of the value of Yak Trax.

The streak continues, and my tailbone has mostly recovered from the fall on the ice. I’ll be grateful for milder temperatures this week. Wind chill isn’t a particularly good feeling, and neither is a bruised tailbone. But persistence feels good, and I’m glad to have made it into another week of streak running.

It's the journey, not the destination

Ten days ago, my friend Nicole persuaded me to try a half-marathon with her in December. Tempted, I began ever-so-tentatively training: first an eight-mile run, then five days later a ten-mile run, and once I had both of those distances under my belt I was hooked. From our respective home offices, at the agreed-upon time, we logged on to the website to register for the race.

And learned we were already too late; the race was full.

For the rest of the day, I thought about how sure I was that I was ready for a half-marathon, and how now I wouldn't be doing one as planned. All that psyching-up for nothing. It wasn't a matter of just finding a different race; winter races in New England are hard to come by, especially for casual athletes. I can't do a Thanksgiving race because it feels too soon to run a distance nearly twice as long as I usually run -- I was counting on the full six weeks of training, not two -- and also because as Thanksgiving dinner host, I can't be away from the house for half the day. After Thanksgiving, there are very few races to be found in this part of the country until late spring.

But it wasn’t long before I stopped feeling disappointed about missing out on registration and found that instead, I was thinking about how great I felt after the two training runs I'd done in the past week. It occurred to me that even without a race number or an official measured course to run, I could still imagine I was training for a half-marathon, and do the same running.

It’s the journey, not the destination, I reminded myself. This mantra came in handy just a day later when I told another friend I’d join her for a day trip to Bar Harbor, Maine, to look at summer rental properties. I had it in my mind that Bar Harbor was about four hours away; it turned out to be five, and even though we left the house at 8 a.m. on Saturday morning, by the time we’d reached our destination, had a harborside picnic, and toured three potential rental options, it was nearly 4:30 and dusk was falling. And we still needed to drive back.

But as with training for the non-race, I realized the journey and not the destination was what mattered. Maine’s northern coast is beautiful but desolate in November, and we’d spent almost the entire day in the car. It hadn’t been a great trip from the perspective of what we’d done there. But the ride itself had been wonderful. It was the best visit we'd had in years. We caught up on everything that had happened to us all fall – and then some. Since my friend was driving, I napped a little, read a little, and had some time to prepare for my Monday night class. From the perspective of the drive itself, it was a great day.

The journey, not the destination. I’ll try to continue with the training runs and hope that when the opportunity for a half-marathon arises in the spring, I’ll still want to do it. But either way, I’ll keep savoring the running. Getting there, after all, can be well over half the fun.

Thirteen-point-one miles....maybe

Thirteen-point-one miles.

Oh, I haven’t actually run it yet. But I think I might.

The idea began germinating last Thursday when my friend Nicole joined me for my usual weekday two-mile run. One of the many things we had to catch up on, having not seen each other in nearly a month, was the half-marathon she ran last month in St. Louis, and at some point in the conversation she mentioned there was one coming up next month in New Hampshire.

“Send me the info on it, if you could,” I said.

She was surprised and actually so was I. I’ve been in the same running pattern for several years now: two miles on weekdays, four or five, and very occasionally six, on Saturdays and Sundays. It’s been working well for me.

My daily running streak is more than six years long. Why change anything?

But as soon as I told Nicole to send me the information, I started noticing omens.

Just a couple of days earlier, my friend Leigh had given me an unexpected gift, a pair of fancy padded running socks. Late last month I’d gotten together with a former co-worker whom I hadn’t visited with in over ten years. She told me she had recently become an ultra-marathoner, completing distances of 38 to 52 miles per race. “But how do you do that?” I kept asking. “First I ran a marathon,” she said. “Then I realized after 26 miles, there’s no difference in what you can do physically; it’s all psychological."

Well, I began to think, if she could make the psychological jump from 26 miles to 52, then I could probably make the same jump from my usual six to a little over twice that.

There was the fact too that I’ve been thinking a lot about aging lately, and this felt like something that might make me dwell a little bit less on what it meant to be just a few years from fifty.

It just started to seem like something I might be able to do. And once I started to think that way, I began to feel like it might be something I really wanted to do. 

I’m still not fully committed to the idea. For that matter, I’m still not even registered for the race. At the time Nicole and I first discussed it, the race date was six weeks and two days away. I knew I could do six miles. So with five weekends before the race, I reasoned, I’d do eight miles the next weekend and then build by one mile each week, which would bring me to twelve miles the weekend before the race. If I could manage to do each of those distances as the respective weekend arrived, I’d feel like the half-marathon was worth a try. If I found the training too difficult along the way, I’d stop. Six weeks isn’t really long enough to train for a half-marathon. If I couldn’t do it, I’d reconsider in the spring, when there would be more races to choose among.

But I did do the eight-mile run last Sunday. It felt good, and not all that difficult. Now I’ve told a few people I might do the half. And I found the race website myself even before Nicole sent me the information.

So it could happen. I’m not sure yet. I probably won’t make a decision for another two or three weeks. But the idea is somehow tantalizing. The possibility of conquering a new challenge is close at hand. Little lies at stake; I won’t feel bad about it if I end up backing out. There will be other chances for other half-marathons.

But this just might be the one. All those omens, after all. Time will tell just what they all signified.

34 degrees and raining (a day in the life of a daily runner)

I have often remarked that the best thing about being a so-called streak runner, someone who logs a mile or more of running 365 days a year, is never having to spend time deciding whether or not it’s a good day to go running. I go every day; hence, I never have to choose whether to go.

And there are certainly times of year when that’s fortunate, because if I had to stop and think about it, I almost definitely wouldn’t get out the door.

This past week has been like that: the doldrums of winter, especially from a runner’s point of view. The three consecutive weekends of storms left over two feet of snow on the ground. In our town, the sidewalks don’t get plowed, which means running in the roadway with a three-foot snowbank to hurdle if you need to get out of the path of oncoming traffic. So I’ve been running on the long driveway at my parents’ farm, up and down, up and down; if I do three or four different variations on taking all the different forks in their driveway and then doing a loop around the parking lot of the ice cream stand next door, I can just barely eke out two miles. It’s safe from traffic, but the driveway has been slushy and icy all week; my feet get soaked and my clothes get muddy.

Up and down, up and down. Tedious, chilly and wet; yesterday it was raining as well, compelling me to trot out my favorite quote from Runner’s World founder Amby Burfoot: “There is no bad weather for running. Okay, maybe 34 degrees and raining.” It seems I’ve spent the majority of the past five winters running in 34 degrees and raining.

But this kind of weather is what makes a streak runner, in my opinion. Everyone gets out for a run on a nice spring day. Those of us who “streak” don’t wait for the right conditions – we just go. But to my mind, it’s not really a matter of fortitude as much as simplicity. Committing to running no matter what the weather means freeing up our minds to think about other things, and nothing frees up brain space quite like running perpetual laps up and down a half-mile-long driveway. I don’t need to think about the passing cars (there aren’t any) or the foliage (the trees are bare) or the houses along the way. I just…run, and let my mind fill with whatever it chooses. Anything except the cold damp weather or the icy slush filling my shoes. I try to think about the work I need to attack in the day ahead, or what I should make for dinner, or whether there are any errands I can get done in the afternoon, or how to respond to a complicated email.

The only thing I miss about the days before I became a daily runner was the feeling I’d get after taking the whole winter off from running, when the air was growing warmer and the snow was gone and I’d get a physical and mental craving to go running after not having gone for so many weeks. Now that I don’t take any time off, I never get that feeling, and I miss it. But instead, I get the peace of mind that comes from just plodding along with nothing much to think about. It’s a pretty good payoff, most days.

Nothing much to say about it

Just a little less than three months ago, on August 15, I passed the five-year mark of my daily running streak. Shortly after that date, the director of the United States Running Streak Association wrote to me to ask if I wanted to write something about meeting this milestone for the association’s quarterly magazine.

“When’s the deadline?” I asked. At that moment, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say about hitting the five-year mark.

He told me it was November 15. That sounded far away, a whole season away, the difference between summer vacation and the middle of the fall semester for the kids, the distance between watching the sun set long after an outdoor cookout and commuting home at 5 p.m. in the dark.

But, as so often happens, it was here before I knew it. And I still don’t really have anything.

I’m accustomed to writing on deadline. Weekly articles, monthly newspaper columns, twice-weekly blog posts, regular assignments for a medical website: having to produce copy, whether or not I have anything important to communicate, is truly second nature for me.

 Except for this time. Five years of daily running? I just can’t think of a thing to say about it.

I know that may sound improbable. Yes, there’s been some challenging weather, of both the frigid and scorching variety as well as snowstorms and hurricanes. Yes, there have been a couple of migraines and stomach viruses through which I had to run. Early days, late nights, pre-dawn running. High altitude, unfamiliar neighborhoods, hotel parking lots.

But when you run every day, it all kind of blurs together. As I’ve said before, I don’t think about running any more than I think about taking a shower. Which is to say now and then I have to set my alarm extra early or push myself to fit in in, but most of the time, it’s just an inevitable part of my day, one that happens without thinking.

A few weeks ago, I came across this passage on a blog called The Logic of Long Distance. It summarized my feelings about running better than I could.

"Running doesn't offer a coherent plan or life strategy; it doesn't pretend to completeness or offer the secrets to a well-lived life. What it gives us is a way out of the plans and meanings and senses that have begun to seem virtual and hollow. A run gives life no meaning. It simply reminds us that beyond the sense that life makes, there is so much more life."

Yes. Maybe the reason I don’t have anything to say about my five-year running streak anniversary is that there just isn’t really anything to say. It has no special meaning. It’s just….running. For the sake of running. And in a way that I can’t explain, that’s reason enough.

Holly, halfway through the cross-country season

I didn’t take it too seriously the few times over the summer that Holly mentioned she might want to join her school’s cross-country team. I knew some of her friends were interested and figured that hearing them talk about it was fueling her interest, but it wasn’t clear to me that she even knew exactly what a cross-country team was – or, more importantly, that it involved running, something Holly has almost never been known to do.

But when the date of the first meeting arose, she attended it, and when it was time for the first practice, she asked me to sign a permission slip and write a check. It turned out she really did plan to go through with it after all.

Now we’re four weeks into the season – about halfway through it – and  to my surprise, Holly’s commitment hasn’t wavered yet. She puts in four afternoons a week at practices or meets. She generally doesn’t talk much about training regimens or race times; occasionally I wonder if to her, cross-country is essentially an extension of recess, a chance to wander through the woods while talking with her friends. At least that was the impression I got from her early descriptions of team practices.

But then recently, something changed. Though not a star runner, she discovered at the past few meets that she gets a better time when she tries hard, focuses on the course, and runs by herself rather than with her friends – and her times are actually not bad for a small fifth grade girl.

It’s been a lesson to me in taking her seriously when she says she wants to try something new. And much as I hope she develops a passion for running and an allegiance to this team, I was perhaps proudest of her a few days ago when she said offhandedly in answer to a question Tim asked that she very well might not sign up for the team again next year – four sessions per week just seems too time-consuming, she said. What made me proud was that this was the first I’d heard of her not being crazy about the strenuous schedule. Even though she’d been feeling that way all along, she took her commitment seriously, never voicing her misgivings to me or hinting that she might not last the season.

No, she’s planning to see it through. And even as I nurse a secret hope that with another few weeks to go, she’ll come to like it so much that she will in fact sign up again next season, it’s fine even if she doesn’t. She has discovered the very best part of running: a chance to de-stress while loping through the woods, by yourself or with a friend, caught up in silent reflection or in conversation. It might not be the best basis for a team sport, but it has carried her happily through half the season, and to my mind, that’s a fine start no matter what happens next time around.

Humpty Dumpty and me

Weekday mornings, I do a two-mile run in my own secluded neighborhood. Running in solitude has its merits; I can be as focused and meditative as I wish during those morning runs, when it’s unusual that I see more than one or two other people out dog-walking or biking.

But sometimes I miss running in more populated areas. Sometimes it just feels good to be surrounded by other likeminded athletes, to trade in the feeling of solitude for the sense of being part of a vibrant community. So I’ve developed the habit this summer of heading for the Minuteman Bikeway in Bedford on Sunday mornings to run amidst a steady flow of other runners as well as walkers, bicyclists, and in-line skaters.

And most of the time it’s energizing to be part of that community. But last Sunday my run took a turn for the worse shortly after the two-mile point where I turned around to head back to the parking lot. Somehow I tripped over a small frost heave and saw the pavement rushing toward my face before I could even get my hands out. I landed full-face on the asphalt.

I’ve had a few bad spills in my 27 years of running – maybe two or three – but this was the first time I’d fallen face-first. Though it was a relatively high-traffic time on the Minuteman Bikeway, only one person was behind me at the time, a bicyclist who stopped just seconds after I fell.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

In those seconds, I had already determined that I was conscious and able to move. I picked myself up and moved over to the wooden rail alongside the path, which is the right height for sitting on. “I’m okay. You don’t have to stop,” I told him.

Without another word, he pedaled off, and I regretted what I’d said. I’d answered reflexively, based on my own aversion to anything that makes me stop mid-workout. I suspected he didn’t want to interrupt his ride to check on a stranger’s well-being. But as soon as he left, I wished he hadn’t. I felt awful: my face hurt, my mouth hurt, my palms stung (I guess the hands did catch me at some point along the way, but apparently that was after my face had taken the brunt of the fall), my knees hurt. And yet because I was already sitting on the rail aside the trail, no one who passed me even moments later knew anything was wrong; it’s not unusual at all to see people hunched over alongside the path, catching their breath.

Within a few minutes, I’d patted off most of the blood with the hem of my t-shirt and started up again at a slow jog. After all, there was only one way back to the parking lot, and waiting, or walking rather than running, just meant it would be longer until I was done.

I kept thinking about the bicyclist who rode off. I wished he’d stayed a little longer. I could have used just a few seconds of company. But in my usual attempt to be obliging and not inconvenience anyone, I’d told him he should keep riding.

Despite the throngs of Sunday exercisers, no one else knew anything was wrong as I ran my last two miles back. What felt like a lot of blood coming from my lips and chin was really just occasional droplets welling up, and I was blotting them with my t-shirt as I ran. Besides, the people passing me from the other direction saw me for only a split second, if at all, as they pedaled or ran by.

Back in my car, I drank some water, cleaned off some more blood, and then drove to the bagel shop where I often stop after using the Bikeway for a dozen bagels to bring home. Normally I grumble to myself about the counter service at this shop. But today, the same woman who in the past has seemed to me to be much more interested in chatting with her co-workers than helping customers stared at me and then handed me a plastic bag full of ice cubes. “Hold this against your face for the swelling,” she said. I thanked her – for the ice pack, and for the unexpected concern.

It was a reminder that human nature can surprise you. I blamed the bicyclist for not being more solicitous, but the woman at the bagel shop surprised me with her compassion. “No head injury; no orthopedic injury; some scrapes and bruises are really not that big a deal,” I told myself on the drive home. “Like Humpty Dumpty, I just had a bad fall, that’s all.”

And that reminded me of a goofy line from my son’s recent middle school play, in which, a little girl wandering through a fairy-tale forest comes across Humpty Dumpty sitting on his wall. “I heard you had a bad fall!” she says. “Yeah, but I had an awesome summer!” he quips.

And as it happens, I am having a generally awesome summer, so as corny as the joke is, it made me feel better. Like Humpty Dumpty, you had a bad fall, that’s all, I told myself. But it doesn’t change the rest of the summer.

So now I’m nursing the bruises and hoping the swelling goes down within the next week or two. I look like I was in a barroom brawl, and when I close my eyes I still see the pavement rushing toward me, but I’m fine. Bad fall. Awesome summer. It was good enough for Humpty Dumpty, and for me as well.

Not a half-marathon, but a very small challenge

When my friend Nicole asked me a couple of months ago whether I’d like to train for a half-marathon with her, I thought about it, but not for very long.

I knew it would be a good challenge for me. It would knock me out of the general complacency I’ve developed as a runner: yes, I do this official streak thing where I run a mile or more every day and have for almost five years now, but it’s been a while since I tried something that really made me push my limits.

And I knew I could probably succeed, if I followed her training schedule. Back in 2003, for a period of about six months, I did a 13-mile run once a week. That was almost a decade ago, but I think I still have the capacity for it.

Moreover, even going beyond the questions of whether I had or could develop the physical ability to run a 13-mile race, the idea of doing this supported my belief in setting goals and challenges of all kinds for oneself. Much about my life has grown comfortable recently, and for that I’m grateful: with my work, my household, my personal relationships, much has seemed blessedly easy lately. Maybe it was time to push the envelope, to find a new way to make myself stretch beyond my comfort zone.

Yet after thinking all of these thoughts fairly briefly, I said no. I admitted that I really just didn’t feel like pushing myself to run a lot longer than I was accustomed to, and I didn’t want to put in the time that training would consume, either. Even if my daily life isn’t overly taxing these days, it’s busy, and I didn’t want to take on something that would eat up the minutes and hours of peaceful weekend mornings.

Still, as Nicole updated me weekly on her training, I felt twinges of envy. Nicole considered herself a beginner when she started occasionally running with me; it was with me that she first ran four miles, five miles, six miles, and she gave me credit for motivating her by example to do it. Now she was surpassing my mileage every weekend.

But I still didn’t want to do it, even though I was a little disappointed in myself for feeling that way. It would be a great time to take on a training challenge, an ideal time to push my body to new physiological and athletic benchmarks. Building up to do something new like a half-marathon would probably give me all kinds of new insights and modes of self-awareness, I suspected. And yet I just didn’t want to do the running, to make myself be out on the road for more than an hour at a stretch, to test myself anew week after week, in preparation for a single event in July that I might possibly not even be able to complete when the time came.

I resigned myself to the fact that sometimes we’re ready to take on a new challenge and sometimes we’re not. Sometimes, despite being able to see so vividly the possible advantages of setting out on a conquest, it’s the right time not for new conquests but for accepting self-imposed limits, for admitting that time and comfort are more important priorities at the moment than conquering personal frontiers.

So yesterday morning I set out on an easy four-mile run. I just wanted to enjoy the peaceful sunny Sunday morning, not work hard. Four miles would be a breeze, I knew. Easy, enjoyable, relaxing.

Nearly two miles in, though, I saw Nicole running toward me. I knew it was her nine-mile day; without meaning to, I’d been keeping track of her training schedule in my mind and remembering what week she was up to each Sunday.

If I turned back at the two-mile mark as planned, I wouldn’t even be running half her distance.

And just realizing that was enough to motivate me to add on an extra mile. Five miles is still not a big deal, but at least I was pushing myself beyond what I’d planned to do, and that felt good.

I ran five miles and savored every moment of it. So I suppose in the end, the lesson is that both parts are true. Yes, it’s okay to admit when you just feel like resting on your laurels and not taking on new challenges: going with what’s comfortable and easy once in a while instead of feeling forever compelled to overcome new hurdles is a reasonable choice.

And yet it’s also good to find challenges wherever and whenever you can, and take the opportunities that come along.

Running five miles isn’t particularly difficult for me, but the salient fact was that I’d set out for four. Running five instead was pushing myself just a little bit, and feeling motivated by someone else’s hard work to try to do likewise.

It’s no half-marathon, but it was a good way for me to put in just a little extra effort on a sunny Sunday morning, and a good way to remind myself that sometimes, just a little is all you need.

Running wherever

Two weeks ago, in the Sunday Boston Globe published on the eve of the Boston Marathon – a perfect time for writing about running -- Geoff Edgers wrote an engaging essay about all the different cities all over the world in which he’s gone running. And it inspired me to think about all the different places I’ve gone running in the past 25 years.

Running is definitely not my favorite form of sightseeing. Walking is the ideal way to get to know a city; running is not. It’s not only that you’re moving faster (but not a whole lot faster, in my case); it’s that you take in less scenery when you’re preoccupied with oxygen intake, or at least that’s the case with me. Other factors that preoccupy me when I run in new places are finding long roads that don’t dead-end and not getting lost.

But even before starting my running streak, travel almost always included plenty of running, simply because a lot of times there was no other good exercise option. And I can apply all kinds of superlatives to apply to the various worldwide running routes I’ve explored.

Most dangerous: Bermuda, where I found no sidewalks and ran amidst the traffic for five miles.

Most anxiety-provoking: a run in the English countryside near Stratford, which sounds lovely enough in itself, but I became wildly lost in the course of the run, and the only road I could find was a highway where no one could stop to give me directions. Worse still, I was on a group business trip and had slipped out with just enough time to fit in a run before the bus left the hotel to take us on an excursion: the more lost I became, the more I was in danger of either missing the bus or holding up the whole group. I found my way back literally just in time to board the bus, unshowered and frazzled, to the amusement of my colleagues.

My most ill-advised running plan, though I didn’t fully realize it until years later, was in Venezuela. We were staying in a villa in a gated community; I ran past the guardhouse and then found a rural winding trail alongside the beach. I knew nothing about the area or the advisability of being out on my own running. Every now and then, I’d pass a group of fishermen, but no one else was out on this rugged stretch of beach. It turned out fine, but with the wisdom I’ve gained in the past twenty years, I find it a little hair-raising to think about how blithely I set out knowing nothing about the safety of my surroundings.

In Meteetsie, Wyoming, I set off on a state highway with the goal of a five-mile out-and-back. On the horizon I could see a singular tree. In about two and a half miles, I reached that tree and turned around. It’s the only time I’ve ever been able to fix my sights on a single landmark for the entire run.

In Paris, I ran in the early morning of a New Year’s Day and had the surrealistic experience of having the streets of Paris around Place d’Etoile all to myself. The whole city was still sleeping off New Year’s Eve.

In La Jolla, California, I ran “the Stanford Dish.” At Disney World, I ran below a magpie nest and had the top of my head pecked as a punishment. In Boston during a pre-dawn run I once tripped over a rat, though at the time I assured myself it was a squirrel.

But over the course of a quarter-century, I think my most memorable run happened in August in Colorado. It was on the Rio Grande Trail that runs alongside the Roaring Fork River outside of Aspen, in a canyon below mountainside property that for more than fifty years belonged to my grandparents. I’ve run that same route dozens of times, but this one was unforgettable because earlier in the day, we’d held my grandmother’s memorial service. As I ran near my grandparents’ ranch, I was convinced I could feel her spirit and that of my grandfather’s settling over the valley.

“Strange,” I thought to myself as I ran, “I always believe in the imagery of spirits rising skyward, but theirs seem to be setting into the mountain, into the river, into the earth.”

I kept running, looking at the late-afternoon sunlight on the water, at the shimmering aspen trees for which the town is named, at the red packed dirt under my feet, at the sagebrush growing on the nearby hillsides. I didn’t want that run to end; it was the strongest sense of my grandparents’ spirits I’d had before or since, as I passed near their last earthly home and through the landscape that felt very much to me like where their spirits were settling to be at rest.