Running is only minimally about racing for me. If I could never race again I’d still run. I’ll always run. I intend someday to be one of those very old men you see shuffling along at four miles per hour. Wearing jeans. Nevertheless, I love to race and something I’ve noticed about my racing is that I’m no longer compelled to go long, and this puts me at odds with most of the running world – with the world at large, actually. I haven’t cracked the psychological code or the cultural value system or whatever it is that makes going far rather than going fast – which is my thing – the dominant racing motivation these days, but there it is, for sure. I’m not disparaging long races. I’ve been there. I’ve done my share of marathons. I even did a couple of fifty-milers and hell, yeah, those were deeply satisfying encounters with the unknown. You cover a lot of terrain running for nearly ten hours, and I mean in your head as much as on the ground. Running for hours and hours can be a profound undertaking and for those who feel the pull of going long, I say, Go! But I do want to make the point that you don’t have to.
This thought occurred to me in the past week when a recent race I was in came up. “How far was it?” I was asked. “Five miles,” I said. “Five miles? I could probably do that,” this person, a non-runner, said. Now, if this had been said in a tone that indicated the speaker was opening her mind to the possibility of taking up running, I would have cheered. But that wasn’t her tone; instead, she was unimpressed. I don’t blame her: Every signal sent by the popular culture is that longer is better, that you really aren’t even a runner if you aren’t doing marathons.
Which is why it must be said: A short race, run with the intention of challenging yourself to go fast from start to finish, can be every bit the adventure of a long race. True, there will be none of the grinding, contemplative hurt of a long race, and you might not be so sore the next day that you go up and down stairs sort of sideways, that badge of honor every marathoner wears around the office the Monday after the race; instead, as you work desperately to maintain your pace through mile four of the five-miler, the penultimate mile always the hardest one, there will be a mind-exploding kind of pain, a shrieking crying out by the body’s ultimate regulator (the “central governor,” as Noakes calls it) to stop, stop, just stop! Not stop so you can sit down and take a rest. You won’t be carried away by the thought of reclining on the couch or in a warm bath; no: stop because disaster, some kind of internal conflagration, seems imminent. If you’re like me, you’ll be carried through this horror by the self-assurance you will provide yourself that you will never ever subject yourself to such a thing again. The lies we tell ourselves!
– Pete Danko
(Photo: Emil Zatopek, four-time Olympic gold medalist)