I am sure that some of this is my age beginning to show. A grumpy older runner. This fall will mark 20 years of me running seriously. I have gone from a basketball short, soccer shoe wearing freshman to a relatively knowledgeable coach and decent runner in my own right. Like many aged runners, I have borne witness to numerous changes in running. Not as much as some, but more than most. Tech tees, GPS watches, and Coloresque runs to name a few. All in all this is a good thing. Competition, innovation, and progress are all really important in our world. But I cannot imagine being a new runner and sifting through all of the clatter that makes up modern running knowledge.
All of this has the possibility of shouting down the joys of what should be an absolutely simple sport. Maybe the most simple and egalitarian sports of all. No special equipment or facilities are necessary. No needed social upbringing or training (though some social/financial flexibility helps a whole lot). Just the desire to work hard, deal with that work, and embrace something that not many people choose to take on.
But the act of running brings along some of my favorite noises. Noises that can’t be measured with page clicks, likes, or retweets. Wind through the evergreens across a mountain valley. The tap tap of spikes digging in at the beginning of track intervals. Snippets of songs in my head during solo training runs. Heartbeat pounding in my ears at the end of a long ascent. Crunch crunch of my Brooks shoes on country road gravel. A muted rumble of a train on its journey to who knows where through the oaks in Wilderness Park. The sound of nothing but freezing air on a cold, winter morning mileage day. Encouragement of complete strangers because I am passing by in red-faced struggle during a damn road race. But my favorite, my absolute favorite, is the greeting of a good friend and training partner when we meet in the pre-dawn darkness.
I recently read some commentary from a so-called drink critic. The kind of person who travels from bar to bar looking for bartenders who combine various concoctions of whiskey, bourbon, spices, random oddities, bitters, and whatever else strikes their fancy into something of drinkable delight (not that I have any clue or palette for this type of thing). Point is, he said that even a bottle of cruddy, domestic beer is great if you are with the right people.
Same goes for running. You don’t need to be on mountain single track, finish line of Boston, Chicago Lakefront, Brownlee Road of Sandhills Marathon, diving down the Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon, or staggering up Choo Choo Hill in Pioneers Park. Though admittedly all of those things are freaking awesome. If you have good friends and training partners to put the miles in with, running is an incredibly enriched experience. If not, well then, you have your noise to keep you company.
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