Runner's high
Today, I ran 13.1 miles in a row. That’s a big deal for me, it’s the most I have ever run without stopping.
Just after I passed my previous record of 10 miles, I felt like my knees were going to fall apart. My pace slowed, significantly. My breathing became loud and labored. My body was searching for a relief from this pain, this awful and bone crushing pain. The suffering continued like this for the better part of 2 miles as I anxiously negotiated with myself about what changes or micro-adjustments would make the pain go away.
“Stop running,” was the one that kept bubbling up.
But I kept running. Me and thousands of others running the race which wound through 13.1 miles of Brooklyn streets that have, year by year, grown familiar to me. I hobbled into a familiar stretch of pavement, the one circling Prospect Park, around mile 11. My right knee continued pleading with me to stop. By now, I was keeping at it not for any personal reasons but because of the all the witnesses.
Something happened around Mile 12 as we approached the bottom of a hill, a steep and sustained tree-lined path on the East side of the park’s expansive asphalt exercise loop. I’ve run up this hill at least two times a week for the last few months and I felt it a punishing end for a half marathon. As I trudged my way up this behemoth, which felt much steeper than I’d remembered, something strange began happening to me. Somewhere along this slope, I felt what I can only assume was a “runner’s high” for the first time in my life. My body and my mind began to feel foreign to one another. Slowly and then all at once, my body understood that my mind could not be reasoned with. We would not be stopping and the shortest path to ending the suffering laid about a mile and a half in front of us.
Suddenly, the weak muscles of my legs (which are often lazily dragged along by the stronger ones) were marshaled to closely coordinated action. Any knee pain I was feeling completely melted away as I began running aggressively up the punishing hill. I was panting with such pure intensity and emotion that people whom I was passing were alarmed to hear the echo of my chest growing louder behind them.
I would have stopped my disturbing pants if I could, but I had no control over my body; I had set it on a course and that course was automatically being seen through. I continued, dodging and weaving around a crowded race track of other exhausted “last wave of the day,” casual runners until I hit an open stretch where my eyes could safely lock onto the pavement in front of me with newly-discovered intensity. I gained a single ounce of speed.
As I was losing that ounce, out of the corner of my eye, I caught up to a pair of white shoes running at about the same pace I was. My body communicated to me that this was a petite woman in her 20s. Something, perhaps buried in the complexity of the language bodies speak or perhaps a projection of my mind, also communicated a sort of subtle shyness. Our feet landed one after the other in lock-step for almost 150 feet, at first somewhat sheepishly, then unbearably awkwardly, before finally being quietly accepted. There was an intimacy to my interaction with this unseen stranger’s two white blurs: in a way, we were dancing. She slowed, fell out of pace, and continued slowing to a defeated walk. This moment with a stranger proved extremely energizing in ways which I cannot fully convey. I briefly turned around, still running, to make eye contact with the woman with whom I had shared this dance.
“Thank you, I really needed that!” I yelled to her with an involuntary smile. The facial expression she flashed back made it clear she hadn’t heard what I’d said and was either offended or surprised to see me speaking to her so suddenly. Only then had I considered that, upon reflection, this woman hadn’t noticed our cardiovascular tango at all and I had just yelled something unintelligible at a random young woman just as she had stopped running–while giving a smug grin. My body politely nudged my mind back out of the driver’s seat as I turned back around.
And then, I finished. I crossed the finish line of, officially, the longest distance I had ever run, without stopping, ever, in my whole cosmically brief life. The endorphins my brain was blasting like a fire hose into my body slowed to a trickle and my body was back to sending familiar pain signals.
My right knee began to throb.