11/27/2022: 9.13 Miles
You didn’t really know what you expected, but you did expect your first nine miler in seven months to be a bit of a challenge. You know, the usual kind of trial: A bit of ache in the legs, a bit more gasp in the breath once you got to the last, less familiar mile or two. You wince at the fast pace on your watch; you might even have to stop and take a breather at some point.
But none of that happens. You breeze through this nine mile run like you would have a year ago, or perhaps even more easily than back then because right now you’re running 25 miles in a week instead of 75. You come inside, you drink some water, you shake it off. It’s been seven months since you’ve done this, but your body handles it like it’s nothing.
Because it turns out that once you do enough consecutive nine mile runs, your body reacts to running a bit differently. It never gets easier to begin each run eagerly or to recover from them healthily or efficiently, but the running becomes easy. Natural. Like breathing. The running becomes a part of you, impatiently expecting to be accessed and taken from once again in a matter of hours. You know the nature of your trained muscles, almost as well as your body does. This was your existence for a long time.
But you never realized that the effects of all this training would be semi-permanent; you didn’t know that as long as you went for a light, short jog somewhat often, that running nine miles would remain fairly attainable. You thought you would have to earn the mileage back, but it turns out that the mileage has stayed in your legs all this time, covered in scars that give you even greater strength. You might think retaining fitness is a great thing but really it’s bittersweet, because now you know for a fact that it may be a long time before running nine miles will make you feel as accomplished as it did when you stumbled back into the gym during your freshman year of high school and finally, finally stopped running. You just stood there grinning, doubled over and trembling with the deepest pride because for a few seconds you couldn’t move, you couldn’t speak, you couldn’t even think anything but the words I did it, I did it, I did it and you know that it may be a very long time before you get to feel like that again.