Turning the Screws

I keep John Jerome’s The Elements of Effort by my bed and often pick it up if I’m not quite ready for sleep.  The book is a series of snippets organized by season. Since he lives in Western Massachusetts, many of the weather-related entries pertain to Vermont.  You may not have heard of John Jerome — he became the author/editor of Fixx’s annual training log after Fixx passed.  He’s a full-time writer and contributes to Outside Magazine and other publications.  His primary sport is swimming, but he’s done his share of running and road racing. 

The entry I read was entitled “Finishing.”  He describes what we feel as we go through a race, right up to the final sprint.  He suggests “spending time in a rapidly intensifying discomfort zone” is “fascinating!”  Not that he’s saying we actually relish being there.  Rather, being there is the “lure around which endurance sports are built.”  Try explaining this to the non-athlete and you’re likely to get blank stares or some kind of visual indication that they think you are off your rocker, at best.  But we know from experience that turning the screws further leads us to understand that the discomfort need not, and will not, stop us.  Jerome calls this a visit to Edge City, a place we tend to go by the end of every race.

I thought about this as I was running a 5K this past Sunday.  I have been recovering from a hamstring injury for nearly a year and only during the past three months have been able to do anything that resembled training.  In three races back, I had not made it to Edge City…rather I had backed off on the outskirts of town, maybe with the thought I didn’t want to reinjure the hamstring and start the healing process over again.  But I suspected it was something deeper — that I had softened and was not yet willing to feel that discomfort, the screws turning.  So, it was with some resolve I started the race near the front of the pack and committed to stay with it when the going got a bit tough.

For the first mile, I ran 30 seconds faster than my last 5K and for the first time in a year, I felt like I was truly running.  The second mile was 25 seconds faster as the gates of Edge City came into view. This was where it got interesting as the course turned onto a severely eroded cross country section where time was no longer the metric, rather effort.  In a way, that was a distraction from how I was beginning to feel – I didn’t want to twist an ankle or trip on a rut hidden beneath the sand and was paying close attention to where I was stepping.  After six-tenths of a mile of this we came into a clearing and ran toward the finish chute.  It was over!  

I don’t know that I had turned the screws all that much, but I do know I went well beyond a place I had been willing to go during the past couple of months.  There are still three or four races left in the season. And I am looking forward with some reasonable expectation that I will once again find my way into Edge City, a place Jerome suggests you don’t want to live but ‘it’s where you find out who is doing the finishing.”