It was bound to happen. It happens to every runner, if the runners I know are to be believed. One day, they assure me, you wake up with every intention of running, but then…you don’t. (You have your reasons.) But so what! One day is some big deal? No, of course not. You’re a human being, not some spandex-clad cyborg. You’ll get back out there. You’ve been doing it all this time, and there’s every reason to believe you’ll continue.
And then—whoops!—there goes another day. But you’re busy, okay? You’re a busy person. Plus, you’ve barely slept. Plus, you’re burned out at work. Plus, there’s such a thing as overtraining. (You’re nowhere near that threshold, but why quibble with details?) Then another runless day passes—I mean, you couldn’t run today, the pollen count was too high. And that bed felt damn good. And also, what’s one more day of self-indulgence at this point?
You know where I’m going with this. Before long, you’ve bumbled your way down that slippery slope and landed in a fathomless gorge. You fear you’ve undone all your good work. You might actually be right about that, because by the time you finally stop inhaling your denial like a drug and acknowledge the acuteness of your truancy, you haven’t run in weeks.
Okay, fine: I haven’t run in weeks.
Remember how last time I wrote about training for that 5K? How I spit all that game about a concrete goal spurring me on? Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! And Ha! some more! I have fallen off the wagon hard enough to bruise every bone in my body. (That sounds a bit painful, actually—maybe I can use that as an excuse?) While we’re on the subject, let me run down the excuses I have used to avoid running in recent weeks:
I just turned in a column, so I can take a break until the next one.
I have to go to this wedding.
I had to go to that wedding, so I deserve a weekend to relax.
I should write today, I’m so close to finishing that novel revision!
I didn’t finish that novel revision and am sad, so I deserve a weekend to relax.
I have a blister on my heel from those new sandals.
The blister broke, and now I have an open wound.
It’s too hot out.
It’s kinda cold out.
It’s perfect out—I should be reading on a bench!
It’s been too long since I’ve run, and it’s really, really going to suck.
That last one turned out to be 100 percent true: When I did get briefly back on the horse, so to speak, I realized in nanoseconds that I’d made a grave mistake in ever dismounting. My body hurt, my ability to breathe through the hurt had diminished, and I felt, once again, like a loser who is constitutionally incapable of sticking to anything. (Even if somebody—like, say, the good people who make this magazine—reimburses me to do so. That’s about as lame as it gets.) So take a break if you want—just know that you will pay the price.
But I wouldn’t be writing this if there weren’t a happy ending. To get you there, I must digress: Have I ever mentioned Kevin, my boyfriend? (I hate that word; it makes me feel like I’m 15.) Allow me to do so now, taking pains to avoid making you retch. He’s a stellar human being. Babies and dogs like him—even the ones who never stop crying and the ones who ignore everybody, respectively. In fact, Kevin’s only fault is that his knees have been terrible all his life. Throughout his childhood, they’d constantly pop out of their sockets, dropping him to the ground in agony. Now, three surgeries later, his knees are only “pretty bad,” instead of “demonic.”
It’s crucial to him that we operate as a team, boosting each other whenever necessary. Which is why, deep in my runless gorge of regret and lost gains, Kevin—ol’ bad-kneed, great guy Kevin—gamely offered to help me dig myself out.
“I’ll run with you,” he said.
“You have been specifically instructed, by actual medical doctors, not to run,” I replied.
“I can’t do a marathon,” he said, “but I can do a mile or two.”
Hell, I can barely do that.
And so one recent Saturday morning, Kevin and I suit up and stretch outside our apartment (we just moved in together—and don’t think I didn’t use the big, exhausting move as an excuse, too). We walk to the end of the block, enter the park, and set off. We are slow as hell. He tries to talk to me; I tell him I can’t have a conversation when I’m this winded. The run stinks, naturally—but we do it, and it’s done, and just like that, I’m back on the horse. We repeat the process a handful of times. Once, I tried to back out; he looked at me disappointedly until I agreed to put my shoes on. Soon, I’m ready to go it alone, and he’s ready to sit with an ice pack and call his running career kaput.
Am I saying you should get a running partner? No, not necessarily. Am I bragging about my dear man? Yeah, a little. But what I’m really trying to say is this: When the urge to flake strikes, get thee a Kevin. Maybe your Kevin is the thought of the goofy little Pekingese you’ll see on your route. Maybe it’s the Peroni you’ll enjoy during your postrun shower. (Another marvelous thing Kevin has brought to my life: the concept of Shower Beer.) Maybe it’s a sister or app or imaginary friend that keeps you honest. Whatever it is, find something that will motivate, prod, harangue, or shame you into running, that will puncture your excuses and get your feet on the pavement. God knows that if you’re anything like me—or like every single other runner—you’re not always going to be strong enough to do it yourself.
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Kathryn Arnold is a writer in New York City. She’s written for Time, New York, Slate, and Wired, and is the author of the novel Bright Before Us (2011). She is still targeting that 5K, by the way, thanks to Kevin.
