No Mile Wasted

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from December 2003.)

Ask me about my normal daily run, and the answer won’t impress you. Tell me you run longer and faster, and I’ll agree; most runners do.

But try to tell me that my runs lack “quality” or, worse, are “junk miles,” and you’ll get an argument. Here it comes.

For as long as I’ve been running easily and writing its praises, I’ve heard how these runs waste time and effort. That was the knock on my first book, Long Slow Distance, published in 1969.

Eventually I retired the term LSD. It was misleading because it invited runners to stack up the highest possible mileage at the slowest possible pace.

Too much distance can do as much damage as too much speed. I substituted the less catchy but more accurate words such as “gentle” and “relaxed” running.

My shift to a slower gear wasn’t meant to improve my racing but to escape the ravages of excessive speed training. The five other runners featured in that book did the same. To our surprise, all of us improved our race times anyway.

Our improvement didn’t come from any inherent magic in slower running but because this was easier running. It let us freshen up between hard efforts instead of staying forever tired.

I was slow to see that the slower running was less a training system than a recovery system. I raced better by staying healthier and happier, not by training harder.

One way to judge a running program’s success is by the racing results it confers. When runners aim for the biggest racing payoffs, no training is too hard and no sacrifice too great. But another way to judge a program’s value is to ask yourself: would I still run this way even if there were no racing payoff?

The runners from the LSD book didn’t keep racing better indefinitely; no one does. But we kept running, and keep doing it, in the same relaxed way as before.

We can view our runs as either vocational or recreational, as a job or a hobby, as work or play. “Serious” training falls on the left side of those word-pairings. My running leans to the right.

I’ve spent a running/writing lifetime trying not to use certain words, because how we describe an activity shapes our view of it. One such word is “work.” Another is its cousin, “workout.”

Working implies doing something because you must, while not welcoming the job. It suggests putting up with a distasteful task to earn an eventual reward.

But what if that payday never came, or if it was smaller than expected? Would you feel that all your time and effort had gone to waste?

Running isn’t my second job. No one pays me or forces me to practice this hobby. It’s my choice, and I choose to find my rewards in as many days’ runs as possible.

To me, “junk miles” are those run reluctantly today, only as an investment in a better tomorrow. This feels like counting the hours until quitting time, the days until the weekend, the weeks until vacation, the years until retirement. Always working toward a distant finish line may mean missing the fun in being here now.

Running can give its rewards instantly and regularly. Ask me about my runs, and I’ll tell you they’re nothing special – except in the quiet ways that all runs are special. Any mile anyone wants to run, and feels happy for having taken, is never wasted.

UPDATE FROM 2015

This would become my last column for Runner’s World, though I didn’t know it at the time of its writing in late 2003. It appeared without comment from the editors that I was leaving after 33 years in various roles with the magazine. I see now that the column itself stands as a pretty good signoff.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in  as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]