No Meat Athlete

I don’t write about it often, but I’m a father to two wonderful little kids — a four-year-old boy and one-year-old girl.

The obvious question (that people always ask) is whether my wife and I are raising them vegan, and the answer is a qualified yes:

Yes, but we don’t want to choose this lifestyle for them, or to make them resent their plant-based diet and their parents who forced it on them. So we involve our son (and will our daughter too, when she’s old enough) in the garden and in cooking, and we talk to them about why we eat this way. But when they’re old enough to want other foods — say, at a friend’s birthday party — that will be their choice. Outside the home, anyway.

People are less interested in whether we’re raising our kids to be runners, but that’s what I want to write about today. Because the answer is yes. At least, I’m going to try my darndest to steer them toward running marathons when they’re old enough. (Of course, if they just don’t like it, that’s cool too.)

Why running? Why long distances?

Not because “I like marathons, and therefore they should.” Physical fitness entirely aside, I’ve learned that running teaches a lot of important qualities that aren’t so easy to find in other activities these days (cue crotchety old man fist shake at the internet).

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For the past four years, every single one of my runs has been the boring kind.

Who knows how many thousands of miles I’ve endured … and I just realized this.

How did this happen?

Like this: back when I was training to qualify for Boston, I discovered Core Performance Endurance. The program called for two kinds of workouts — intervals and hills — with easy days surrounding each.

To a fairly new runner like myself, the workouts were hard. Sometimes really hard.

But tough as those workout days were, they were better than the easy days. Because on easy days, you had to keep your heart rate below 70 percent of max, and that meant walking up hills. And it meant slowing down when the heart monitor beeped at you every time you started to get a little runner’s high and speed up … say, when a good song came on.

It was mind-numbing. Even worse, as you advanced through the program the length of time you had to endure this interminable boredom increased. From 30 to 40 to 50 minutes.

But the program worked. I qualified for Boston a year later, and I started running ultras for a change of pace.

And slowly, without my noticing, all of my runs became the boring runs.

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Runner or non-runner, whichever you call yourself, I’ve been there. And I think I’ve finally figured out that whole label thing.

When running is fun — when, even when it’s hard, it comes easy — that’s when you feel like a runner.

But most of the time, for most of us, it doesn’t flow like that. It’s a chore, a discipline. A struggle that’s worth it, but a struggle nonetheless. Those times, we don’t feel like runners.

If you’re the former — a runner, all the time — you don’t need this post. Go run because running is fun for you, for its own sake, no other reason necessary. And know that the rest of us envy you, and wish it could be that way for us.

But if you’re not always that runner, today you’re in the right place. I’ve been on both the winning and the losing side of the daily battle to get the miles in. And when it’s working — when it’s actually and truly fun to run (words I never thought I’d say) — here’s what makes it so.

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