Rebuilt for the long run
Photo by Jeremy Lapak on Unsplash
When I was young, I was a sprinter. A quarter mile if I had to, a half or quarter lap if the choice was mine.
Today, my marriage crosses the line at a quarter century and I have discovered that being married this long has turned me into a distance runner. So, seeing as how round numbers—maybe oval ones in the case of this metaphor?—get more thoughtful responses, here are a handful of reflections on the occasion.
The first thing that changes is the sprinter’s heart. Physically, I’m convinced biology built me to run shorter distances. My resting heartrate hovers in the high 80s, which is not optimal for long distances. My ADD doesn’t help on that score either. Beyond having a bit of an aptitude for speed, short races just fit my system.
Check my job history and this has generally been true of my professional commitments as well. Save my current vocation and position, they all seem to come with an expiration date shorter than my performance would demand.
Conversely, good marriages, it turns out, are built outside of what is easiest and most within our nature. In my case, it meant tuning my heart to running longer distances than feel comfortable if that’s what my wife needs.
Let me be clear: this isn’t one of those “being married is the hardest but best choices I’ve ever made!” moments. Feel free to set aside any pumpkin spice-flavored lifestyle blogger personal admission expectations that may lurk in your psyche for this post (and any others of mine you read).
The hard work of a good marriage is remembering you’re running with someone else and their preferred pace gets as much priority as yours does. In fact, the way they run has lessons to teach should you be humble enough to expect this to be the truth and open enough to let your partner change you for the better.
This has definitely been the case in our marriage where I needed help learning to slow down in order to weather life’s tougher moments. Not everything can be conquered by speed and the will to push oneself faster.
Put another way, finish lines are an illusion. We only have the race until we don’t have it anymore.
Another change the sprinter must make in marriage connects to this. Mistakes in short races are small and require small fixes. There’s no time for anything more than that because the race is over so quickly.
Distance runners are playing chess. They’re strategizing responses to the physical demands of the race, the challenge of their competitors, how they feel on any given day, and also where they are in their season balanced against the needs of the moment.
Neither is right or wrong, just vastly different worldviews when it comes to judging oneself in time and space next to everyone else in the race with you. Both are needed in navigating this thing called living.
You may think I’m making my partner a competitor in this case. You would not necessarily be wrong. Or correct for that matter.
Heather is my teammate and I am hers. We are invested in helping each other be the best person we are capable of becoming. But we are also ourselves, and we have to run this race individually. So, we benefit from learning what the other can show us and also the comfort of having each other in the same heat of the race.
Our partnership doesn’t require we lose ourselves. Rather, we gain each other, and that means I’m as happy for her when she wins as she is for me when I do.
This was…not the case when I was a sprinter (except for it was when my teammates were doing the winning instead of me). I hated losing and always wanted to run faster when I did. It’s just that my identity was not bound up solely in the winning, which was a good thing given how many REALLY fast people I ran against.
A note on that: in sprinting it’s near impossible to compare oneself to your competitors while racing. They’re either in front of you and you need to catch them, or they’re behind you and all you want is to keep them there. Comparison only comes after the fact and in preparation for the next race.
Long distance provides the opposite experience from what I’ve seen. I trained for a marathon with a group of students when I was an undergrad and every time we ran all I could think about was how much easier it seemed to be for them. How much they laughed and TALKED TO EACH OTHER while we ran and I wheezed. How they had plans after our long runs more active than laying on the floor in the fetal position.
It took time, but I learned that comparing myself wasn’t a bad thing if I didn’t let the more toxic elements of comparison culture act as the prism for my thinking. Instead, I drew on Amy’s more efficient arm swing and Dave’s lower, less-draining stride to change my own form and make the running just a little easier.
Emphasis on the “little” in that last sentence because it never gets easy. It just gets familiar and familiar is the foundation for learning what we are capable of after we have taken the leap to try something the first time.
A third lesson this sprinter needed aligns with that marathon training. Just a couple weeks before the actual race, I was on a long run at about two in the morning when I stepped off a curb and sprained my ankle. The pain of this was compounded by the fact that I was four miles from my apartment and my roommates didn’t pick up the phone when I called from a phone booth I found.
So, I limped home that night, couldn’t get right in the days before the race, and didn’t get to run it. Four months of training wiped out by a pothole I didn’t see coming and could easily have avoided if I had.
At the time, I chalked it up to my rough history with races I cared deeply about (see also: my last competitive sprint and the torn hamstring that ended it). Then I got married and realized this was a sprinter’s mentality.
Like fixing mistakes in a competitive race, the speed of the short run means any injury basically ends your chances at winning. But the distance runner learns every race requires running through pain.
Another quick note: this does not mean that one ignores the injuries they experience and just keeps running. It means that pain should be expected along with joy (can’t have one without the other, actually) and training the mind and the heart for this pain is just as important as training the body for the run that causes it.
In the best marriages—the ones I hope ours fits next to on the scale—the motivation to do this training is and must be our partner as much as it is ourselves. Otherwise, in our work to avoid our own pain we’ll more than likely create pain for them.
Even when you do you training on your own, as circumstances often demand, you must share what you learned from it with your partner. And they need to return the favor. Otherwise, you’re not a team, just two people hoping chance and fortune will keep them running in the same direction at the same pace. Ask a therapist how that approach generally works out.
One last lesson distance has delivered to bring this loose set of thoughts to a close. It occurs to me, now, that running sprints is what I needed in order to understand I’d need to give up sprinting, even as I miss sprinting deeply.
There is nothing like the feeling of running as fast as you can toward a fixed point. The world slows down and speeds up all at once. The decisions have all been made, so it’s safe to simply feel rather than think about the meaning of that feeling.
When I discovered I could run fast as a kid, I imagined this my superpower. Sprinting was the only place I could slow the racing thoughts in my head, the doubts and fears and inadequacies.
Meditation in 22-second intervals.
But that isn’t real life. Just like sprints give way to races asking for patience and persistence, all things new in life become the results of our care and concern, given or withheld based on the work we put into running the race to honor our commitments to them.
Twenty-five years on, this relationship is still my most important race and the motivation to run that race well all at once. If I’d remained a sprinter, I’m not sure I’d be able to say that. Fortunately, I’m rebuilt for the long run.