The Outdoors

(When Runner’s World cut me loose as a columnist in 2004, I wasn’t ready to stop magazine work. This year I post the continuing columns from Marathon & Beyond. Much of that material now appears in the book Miles to Go.)

2007. A regular run of mine passes along a creekside path. On one side is a botanical garden, on the other a fitness center.

Side-by-side treadmills look out, through a floor-to-ceiling window, onto the creek and garden. Both treadmills are always occupied at the time I run past their users’ window to the outside world.

The treadmillers might be more fit than I am (and surely are younger, better dressed and better groomed). But I think while looking in on them that there’s far more to running than fitness, and they’re missing almost everything but their workout.

The run that touched off this column came on a springtime morning. The chilly air still carried a bite of winter, reluctant to depart.

But the day’s dawning came early enough now to let me see what I passed through and not just trust it to be here. This morning exploded with the sights, sounds and smells of the new season.

Treadmillers miss most of this. The climate and light inside their club never change. They hear the grinding of their machines, or the background sound of music and news. They smell only each other or the deodorizers that mask the aromas of human effort.

I applaud the treadmillers for their effort, which probably is greater than mine. But I wish they would step across the plate-glass window and experience the wider world of running outside.

Exercising indoors, and in place, is like watching the natural world pass by through a car window. You see it but don’t feel it. You’re apart from it, not really a part of it.

In the gym, every day is much like every other. Outdoors, no day is quite like any other.

I’m out every day of every week at dawn or before. I run most of those days. But even when the day calls for a walk, I’m still out at the same hour, in the same clothes and on the same routes, for the same length of time.

Running days never exactly clone themselves. Conditions of weather, qualities of light, varieties of sight and sound are forever remixing into something new. Without stepping outside, you can’t know exactly what freshness the day holds.

Later. This was one for my friend Norm Lumian, who died in spring 2007. He was one of life’s ultrarunners, running for more than 60 of his 78 years.

Post-polio syndrome gradually took away the use of his legs. Anticipating his future, he adopted an unusual routine in the late 1990s: a run one day and a wheelchair session the next. No one I met on the streets and trails of Eugene appeared to enjoy mornings more than Norm, even as the speed and scope of his runs decreased.

The retired college professor often phoned to “grade” my columns and to “assign” new ones. He said late in his life, “Why don’t you write sometime about the simple pleasure of getting outside for a run each day?” Assignment completed, Professor.

(Photo: Pre’s Trail, the greatest of Eugene’s great outdoors.)

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, Pacesetters, Running With Class, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, Starting Lines, and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]