I am a runner—whether the rest of them like it or not.
By Susan Anspach • Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
This month, I started a running program. It is the easiest running program I could find on the Internet. Containing 16 workouts for four weeks, each of its sessions is 30 minutes long. That’s eight hours of exercise, total, or less than half the recommended amount for a healthy lifestyle. It’s just enough running for me to tell people that I am running, to justify wearing loose-fitting clothing all day, and to feel OK about eating a king-size bag of Skittles for dinner. This is an ideal lifestyle for me.
In 30 years, I’ve run plenty. I’ve also abstained from running, plenty. Being that it is exercise, it doesn’t appeal to me, but I do like that it’s generally cheap and difficult to screw up. I am cheap and, at times, a screw-up, so it works out in my case.
I ran track in high school because it didn’t conflict with marching band season, and what I learned from that was I hated marching band, but also I really, really hated track. In marching band you sweated just as much as in track, but at least when you performed, people stopped what they were doing to watch. On the other hand, if you see an adult at a girls’ track meet who’s not a parent, coach, maybe exceptionally supportive aunt, it is 100-percent fine to pepper-spray first and ask questions later.
For my Manassas high school, I ran the mile, the event into which they shuffled all the kids who weren’t really fast but also couldn’t run too far. Our training runs were an unsupervised three miles, and most days we jogged around the front of the school, dropped onto the grass, and painted our toenails. We did that for three years. I still have the letter jacket.
Running was big at my college, where the weather was not cool. My school also had an Olympic-size pool and three literal tiers of elliptical machines with cup holders for Gatorade and air-conditioning blasting you with the force of an industrial snow blower. None of it mattered. You could step outside any summer hour, day or night, and a pack runners would be pounding by. Runners there actually ran more when it rained. They were a hazard for cars, or at least my car. I didn’t run at all in college. By senior year I’d found most of the hidden free parking on campus and barely walked. You could say I was counter-culture that way.
Later on in my twenties, I had two boyfriends. One was an unemployed barfly who had more than a single pizza delivery number on his phone contact list (so easy to give up, but also a tiny bit hard). The other was a military officer. You can guess when I started running again.
He wanted to train for a marathon; I declined, explaining how most days I didn’t want to drive 26 miles in my car. We comprised and started planning for my first half. Responsibilities were split thusly: He was in charge of designing our workouts; I was in charge of finding our race. Training to run 13 miles for the first time can be a bit of a shock to your system, but it’s nowhere close to as bad as seeing what people expect you to pay to run 13 miles. And did you know there are marathons you have to run to run—excuse me, qualify for—some other marathons? (Most people, apparently, do know this.) I scoured a 100-mile radius of Washington, D.C., for the cheapest race I could find. The Half-Sauer, Half-Kraut in Pennsylvania Dutch Country was scheduled for late July, which should have been my first tipoff, but wasn’t.
We trained for three months, and in fairness, I had forgotten a few things I did like about running. I like the feeling you get from it—the conviction of superiority over everyone else who isn’t running. I like shopping for running, and we did a lot of that. We spent buckets on outrageously priced new shoes, which we did use, plus many dollars on running apps, gender-specific body glide and an aerodynamic key pouch, never touched. I was most excited for the run when I could justify eating while I running. I had very thoughtfully selected a mango-flavored gel for our nine-mile course, and I can’t begin to describe the disappointment of what that tasted like.
On race day, we rose early and drove north. Right away I knew something was wrong. I planned on it being cooler in Pennsylvania, and the race website had promised a mostly flat, shaded route among trees. At eight o’clock in the morning, the temperature was 85 and climbing. The leaves on what few skeletal branches hung overhead were limp with humidity. Heat wafted up off the wave of pavement spread before us over many, many hills.
If I’d been there alone I would have spent the morning eating Luna bars in my car, but I couldn’t ditch out on my buddy. No one cheered for us on that race, because the people who’d come to cheer got too hot and went home. At least at the finish you got all the sauerkraut you could eat. On the walk to the parking lot I saw the first-place finisher for women, who glared at me when I congratulated her on the time. None of us was a winner that day.
It took me a long time after that race to rouse myself again from the sidelines, and I have that kind of luxury. My husband, the one who suffered the 13-mile inferno alongside me, does not. He has to run for his job with the Air Force. They dress it up with different themed 5Ks. They try so hard. There’s a 5K most weekends and you can tell they’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with a new spin on the same three miles. This year there was a Women’s History Month 5K. At the Martin Luther King Jr. Awareness Day Run the top 10 runners were supposed to get T-shirts. Eleven people registered for the race.
I will say this for the United States military: That 11th person at least got a free pizza that day. I keep coming back to the food, and that’s on purpose. There aren’t many reasons I run (I’ve never had one of those “workout highs” the rest of you lie about), so they factor big into my decision to do it. Good beer is one reason. Unhealthy children’s cereal, consumed daily, is another. Movie popcorn is a fantastic reason to run, but really any food you can buy at the movies. Anyway, it was the moment I smelled those pots of bubbling sauerkraut awaiting me at the half-marathon finish line that I swore off racing forever.
For now, my husband’s race days are also behind him. He threw out his back and is on doctor’s orders to take up swimming, or yoga. I’ve told him I’ll go with him to yoga. In the pool, he’s on his own. I’ve already done swimming, as an 8-year-old member of the Stonewall Seahorses. I swam breaststroke, the event into which they shuffled the kids who couldn’t do a good flip turn. Between meets we dropped onto the grass and painted our toenails.
It wasn’t so bad—but after, my dad always bought me a snack, and that helped.
(August 2014)