The End of Running as I Know It

My cycling coach told me to run during the fall and winter as cross-training for my workouts on the bicycle. I tried to explain to her that I hadn’t run for years. Literally. And that I might go faster if I walked. Unflappable, she told me to go out once a week for an “easy” run. She told me to run twenty minutes the first time, adding five minutes each time I ran. I could go as easily as I needed to, just fast enough to “work up a good sweat.”

I was worried. There was a reason I had stopped trying to run. First of all, I sucked. I’m just not a natural runner. When in the past I had jogged in the park (I really can’t call it running) I got passed by everyone. And I mean everyone. Men, women, kids, old people, disabled people (I’m not kidding). I’ll never be a good runner.

Secondly, my knees are problematic. I tore them up when I was younger, and later doing martial arts and stilt-walking. They’ll never be 100 percent again. At one point in my life my knees were so bad I had a hard time going up stairs. Then I got really scared and decided to take better care of my joints, since the idea of not being able to use my legs in the future was a grim prospect.

That’s when I started cycling, following the advice of my physical therapist. And stopped running. During the years that followed, I jogged occasionally (indoors, on a cushiony treadmill) for fifteen minutes as a warm-up for doing something else. For the last three years I had stopped doing even that.

Now my cycling coach wants me to go out and run. I’ve done it five times so far. And you know what? It feels weird, but I like it. I go at times when I don’t want to ride my bike, when it’s too cold or dark for me to feel good on the bicycle. One thing I’ll say, running workouts are a lot shorter than cycling workouts, so it doesn’t feel like my whole day is spent accomplishing one thing. And I don’t have to spend hours enduring the cold or the rain or the wind. That’s nice. If I go out for less than an hour, I don’t feel like my day is being taken over by training. I can keep this part of my life in perspective.