About 60% of runners start doing it to lose weight. Of all forms of exercise, running is second only to cross-country skiing in its efficiency at melting off fat. But you have to run a lot to lose weight.
Soon after a child learns to walk, he or she begins to run and runs everywhere, and in humankind’s infancy we’ve run from the beginning. From the Tarahumara runners of Mexico who ran 15 to 75 miles a day when hunting millennia ago and run long distances still, to the track-and-field sprinters and racers of the late 1800s, to modern-day Olympians and ultramarathoners, we seem born to run.
As recreation, jogging grew in popularity in the late 1960s. The hairstyled jogger in a velour jogging suit became an iconic figure. Early runners training around town faced bottles thrown at them, or gangs of toughs chasing them.
Barry Hopkins, who founded the Onteora Runners Club in the 1970s, remembered another persistent kind of antagonist. “The dog, urged on by its owner, would charge out through the hedges and immediately encourage many a runner into a 60-second quarter-mile, often minus the seat of their shorts,” he wrote.
That club now has about 400 members. (Find them at www.onteorarunners.org/.) Another local club is the Hudson-Mohawk Road Runners Club, based in Albany, has 30 organized runs per year, some not far from us. Formed in 1971, it now has more than 2000 members. (www.hmrrc.com.) In Dutchess County, the Mid-Hudson Road Runners club in Lagrangeville is at www.mhrrc.org. An “unstructured” club is at www.shawangunkrunners.orgat www.shawangunkrunners.org.
Signing up for a race is a great way to amp your motivation to train, and to keep running. The Fair Street 5K is scheduled for Kingston on November 18. There are also almost innumerable Turkey Trots before, during, and after Thanksgiving.
Trots include the Mid-Hudson Road Runners Club Turkey Trot, with 25K, 5-mile and 2-mile runs and a kids’ run at Arlington High School on November 22. Ferncliff Forest in Rhinebeck will also host a 5K on the same day. On November 24 there’ll be a Run Off That Turkey Trot 5K in Altamont and the same day the Phoenicia Turkey Trot, a two-mile “fun run, ramble, trot, walk or wobble,” plus a Tot Trot, to benefit the Shandaken Food Pantry.
I won’t be ready for a 5K by Turkey Day but have signed up for the Holiday Classic in Hudson on my late dad’s birthday, December 22. Can a middle-aged, overweight woman with a bad habit or two, who until two months ago hadn’t run for 30 years or so, and even then just here and there with the sole motivation to look good for guys, run 3.1 miles in the dead of winter? It remains to be seen.
I’ve always been a walker, a dancer, but can I fly? Running is different from walking: harder, and a little scary. Sometimes I get all dressed up to run and suddenly have to clean my closet or sort my recyclables first.
When you run both feet leave the ground at the same time; that’s the difference between running and walking. And having both feet off the ground at once is the closest thing to flying. Sometimes, running up a tall hill on the quiet winding roads near where I live, I feel like an airplane taking off. But more often I feel like a lumbering buffalo.
It isn’t easy, and it doesn’t always feel good. I don’t have a masochistic bone in my body, and for more years than I care to count I’ve been more accustomed to using my body for functional and pleasure-seeking purposes rather than to keep myself on the planet longer. But now I do it for so many reasons, like to stave off stress and high blood pressure, or just to get sweet lungfuls of fresh Hudson Valley air, and to do something that I didn’t think that I could do.
