Running leads to Cycling

I’m ready to write about my bicycle tour of Alaska, British Columbia, and Yukon Territory. But first, I’ll write a couple of posts about why I started cycling in the first place.

Update: I forgot that I had already written about my discovery of bicycle touring in one of my old posts — Accidental Bicycle Tourist — so I’ll jump right into Touring AK, BC, and YT next. And I found a picture of the start of the Bloomsday race.

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I never was much of a runner. One time in high school, everyone tried to run a mile as part of some experiential event. I barely made it. When I went to college, everyone had to run two miles in less than 13 minutes to pass the physical education class. And it was a required course.

James Craig — my college friend from Nigeria — and I were the slowest runners in the class. We worked the entire semester trying to get under 13 minutes. We both made it, but not by much. We got no coaching whatsoever on how to run, even though the professor was the assistant athletics coach. He expected us to just get out there and do it. (These days there are tons of excellent information on the internet, but it hadn’t even been imagined yet then.)

I started running again 20 years later. I wanted to get in better shape for backpacking and build stamina in case I had a problem while racing my Hobie Cat out in the ocean. I decided I’d run two miles around the middle-school track in the mornings.

I read a bit about how to run before I started. I learned it would be a good idea to run with a forefoot strike instead of a heel strike. I tried that and got terrible cramps in my calves after a lap or so. It took me a few months to train my calves to relax during the time my feet were off the ground. I found I could not concentrate on both of them at the same time, so I started with one leg and then trained the other. I used a forefoot strike from then on.

Then we moved to Spokane. That was an adventure in an ice-storm, but I digress. The ice melted off the road a few days after we moved to our new house in Veradale and I went out to pick up running again. It all went well until I came back up the hill up to our house. About half way up, I had to stop running to keep from heaving.

Yes, running up hills is quite different from running on the flat. I decided my goal was to work up to the point where I could run all the way up that hill. That took a month or two. I was still as slow as ever on the flats, but nobody ever passed me on a good hill after that. What’s the saying? What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?

I learned there were all kinds of organized, five-mile “fun runs” in Spokane. I began working from two-mile runs up to five. Much to my surprise, I found it became easier to run five miles than it had been to run two. I ran dozens of those runs, and have tee-shirts to prove it.

Two miles in 13 minutes is 6.5 minutes per mile on a flat track. Tough for me as a 20-year-old college kid. I was able to run five miles in Spokane in under 40 minutes (sub-8-minute miles) with a few hills thrown in to boot. Not bad for a 50-year-old slowpoke.

Spokane also has an annual Lilac Bloomsday Run. It is 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) and is the largest timed road race in the world. There have been over 40,000 runners in each run since 1986. (Most of the winners are from Kenya.) I have the tee-shirts to show I ran Bloomsday eight or so times.

There’s a hill called “Doomsday” near the finish of Bloomsday. I guess it is a daunting sight for many runners. It was no problem at all for me to run up it. The hills around our house are much more formidable than that little jaunt.

It gets cold in Spokane in the winter (not so much any more). People say you will get frostbitten lungs if you run when it is below -10 degrees. That’s not true. Oh, you need to dress warm and start off slow, but you can work up a sweat running at that temperature. I usually ran before lunch when it was that cold. People at work thought I was crazy, and I did have rosy cheeks when I got back.

My second running career came to an abrupt end after 15 years or so. I read a little book about the damage that running can do to your body, and that alarmed me. I had already experienced sciatic nerve ache and stress fracture symptoms in my foot. The scary part in the book was what running can do to joints and spines. I went out the next day and bought a bicycle. No more running for me.