Run Bob, Run

 

I've lived long enough now to have had many a conversation concerning UFOs, big foot, ghosts, abortion, flag burning, and if light is a particle or a wave. I wasn't always insufferably stubborn. Youth lends itself to an open mindedness that diminishes over the years, not necessarily due to intolerance, but from deja vu. I've already talked it out plenty of times, and I just don't want to do it again with the next generation who is just going to say,



"Ok, boomer"

to me anyway. Besides, I'm not interested in arguing with peeps that as a challenge eat Tide Pods.

I've also found that unlike in my youth when I could run like the wind, today I run like a middle aged accountant in sandals, trying to get away from a wild animal tempted by my soft underbelly. Briefly, I had to stop running because people kept coming up to me to ask,

 

"What's the matter?"

The only logical reason why someone would run so pathetically is to escape from terrorists. Truthfully, I was never a good runner. I know that when I run, it's not pretty. My wife, Christine, is one of those silent, gliding type runners who looks like a graceful prancing gazelle as she runs. I clop along like a Clydesdale pulling one of those sleds full of concrete blocks you see at fairgrounds in the summer. People always talk about the runner's high. I've never experienced it. Truth is I've never been high so I wouldn't know a runner's high if it ran right over me.

 

I read Jim Fixx's book, The Complete Book of Running, in the 80's because I thought I was doing something wrong. My technique must be off. I hadn't the right shoes. My wristbands were the wrong color. Something, anything to release my inner Jesse Owens. The red cover of the book had a picture of Fixx's muscular leg, sockless in an expensive world class running shoe. His red shorts where impossibly short in a Steve Irwin kind of way, but let me tell you, back then Jim Fixx had it going on.

Fixx was a heavy smoker and an equally heavy human. He started running at 35, lost 60 pounds, wrote his seminal running book, and helped start the fitness craze in the country. Shortly after I finished the book which I can say was a little one-dimensional with a flat story arc, Jim Fixx died of a heart attack while on his morning run. Talk about a plot twist.

The doctors claimed he was predisposition to heart failure and would have died much younger if he hadn't started running. This news didn't make me feel or run any better. I already felt terrible while running and the thought of giving it up would lead to an early death wasn't exactly the runner's high I was striving for. My father was a Jim Fixx fan. In the early 70's, he started running over lunch with a few of his work buddies because the neighbors called the cops on him and his coworkers for tossing a football in the street. He said the cops showed up and told them not to play in the street so they took up running. He and his factory worker buddies started running in their work boots and jeans until the cops stopped them yet again, convinced they had just committed a crime. An officer asked,

"What are you guys doing?"

"We're running," my father answered.

"Running from what?" the cop inquired.

My mother bought running shoes for my father from the Sears catalog. They arrived three months later and were two sizes too small. Back then, the only thing longer than waiting for merchandise from Sears to arrive in the mail was returning something to Sears that you got from the catalog. Often the item disappeared in the system, and you had to make a toll call to Minnesota to argue with some disinterested Sears worker to get your money back. So my father figured he would wear the sneakers only when riding his bicycle until the day he got a flat tire and discovered he hadn't a patch kit or spare tube. While pushing his bike home, some snot nose, smirking kid saw him and asked in a mocking tone,

"Got a flat, Mister?"

"Yeah, flat like your head," my father answered.

"At least I'm not pushing my head home," the kid said.

By the time he got his bike home, his new sneakers where stained red with blood. Once I was biking with my father, and we pulled up to a restaurant after his shoelace broke on one of the too small, blood soaked sneakers. As he tied the pieces of lace together, a kid on a big wheel rolled up and said,

"Hey stupid! This is my dad's restaurant."

My father said without missing a beat, "Yeah, tell him the food sucks!"

 

In the early 80's, my father and I eagerly watched the movie, Chariots of Fire, which as the name implies is not about burning roman vehicles, but instead, running. It won Oscars for Best Picture, Original Music Score, Screenplay and Costume Design. The movie was about two kids of different religious backgrounds training for the 1924 Paris Olympics. What I learned from this movie is back in the roaring twenties, everyone ran in their underwear.

I soldiered on with my running, now relying exclusively on treadmills to soften the impact. My footsteps are so loud that once a patron wearing headphones complained to management. Medical studies show that runners knees are actually in very good shape compared to non-runners. You would think that all that relentless pounding would mess things up over time, but not so. 

 

Today, I completed yet another miserable run, indoors on a treadmill while listening to the Fine Young Cannibals on my phone. For a brief moment, I felt kind of good. I thought maybe after all these years I finally might be getting a glimpse of the runner's high. I was certain, this was it. I felt like those kids in the lost tribe on Mad Max who thought Flight Captain Walker was going to get the wreckage of that airplane back into the air granting them passage to "tomorrow-morrow land" as I was on the cusp of actually tolerating, maybe, dare I say, enjoying a run.

I think that was, in fact, a runner's high, but I'm not sure. I've run for years without ever enjoying any of it. I've experienced many a runner's low, but never a high. Now that I think of it, the only time I've ever felt good running is when I stopped.

Maybe next time.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on September 29, 2016.